r-NRLF 


B    M 


ENRY  JAMES 


BY    HENRY   JAMES 

A  SMALL  BOY  AND  OTHERS 

NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

NOTES  ON  NOVELISTS 
WITH  SOME  OTHER  NOTES 


THE   MIDDLE    YEARS 


met 


THE 
MIDDLE   YEARS 


BY 

HENRY   JAMES 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES   SCRIBNER'S   SONS 
1917 


COPYRIGHT,  1917,  BY 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


Published  November,  1917 


M5 


EDITOR'S  NOTE 

The  following  pages  represent  all  that  Henry  James 
lived  to  write  of  a  volume  of  autobiographical  reminis 
cences  to  which  he  had  given  the  name  of  one  of  his  own 
short  stories,  The  Middle  Years.  It  was  designed  to 
follow  on  Notes  of  a  Son  and  Brother  and  to  extend  to 
about  the  same  length.  The  chapters  here  printed  were 
dictated  during  the  autumn  of  1914-  They  were  laid 
aside  for  other  work  toward  the  end  of  the  year  and  were 
not  revised  by  the  author.  A  few  quite  evident  slips  have 
been  corrected  and  the  marking  of  the  paragraphs — which 
he  usually  deferred  till  the  final  revision — has  been  com 
pleted. 

In  dictating  The  Middle  Years  he  used  no  notes, 
and  beyond  an  allusion  or  two  in  the  unfinished  volume 
itself  there  is  no  indication  of  the  course  which  the  book 
would  have  taken  or  the  precise  period  it  was  intended 
to  cover. 

PERCY  LUBBOCK. 


3G9885 


TF  the  author  of  this  meandering  record  has 
•*•  noted  elsewhere1  that  an  event  occurring 
early  in  1870  was  to  mark  the  end  of  his 
youth,  he  is  moved  here  at  once  to  qualify 
in  one  or  two  respects  that  emphasis.  Every 
thing  depends  in  such  a  view  on  what  one 
means  by  one's  youth — so  shifting  a  con 
sciousness  is  this,  and  so  related  at  the  same 
time  to  many  different  matters.  We  are 
never  old,  that  is  we  never  cease  easily  to 
be  young,  for  all  life  at  the  same  time:  youth 
is  an  army,  the  whole  battalion  of  our  facul 
ties  and  our  freshnesses,  our  passions  and 
our  illusions,  on  a  considerably  reluctant 
march  into  the  enemy's  country,  the  country 
of  the  general  lost  freshness;  and  I  think  it 
throws  out  at  least  as  many  stragglers  be 
hind  as  skirmishers  ahead — stragglers  who 
often  catch  up  but  belatedly  with  the  main 
body,  and  even  in  many  a  case  never  catch 

1 "  Notes  of  a  Son  and  Brother."  1914. 
1 


2  TEE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

up  at  all.  Or  under  another  figure  it  is  a 
book  in  several  volumes,  and  even  at  this  a 
mere  instalment  of  the  large  library  of  life, 
with  a  volume  here  and  there  closing,  as 
something  in  the  clap  of  its  covers  may  assure 
us,  while  another  remains  either  completely 
agape  or  kept  open  by  a  fond  finger  thrust 
in  between  the  leaves.  A  volume,  and  a 
most  substantial,  had  felt  its  pages  very 
gravely  pressed  together  before  the  winter's 
end  that  I  have  spoken  of,  but  a  restriction 
may  still  bear,  and  blessedly  enough,  as  I 
gather  from  memory,  on  my  sense  of  the 
whole  year  then  terminated — a  year  seen  by 
me  now  in  the  light  of  agitations,  explorations, 
initiations  (I  scarce  know  how  endearingly 
enough  to  name  them !)  which  I  should  call 
fairly  infantine  in  their  indifference  to  pro 
portions  and  aims,  had  they  not  still  more 
left  with  me  effects  and  possessions  that 
even  yet  lend  themselves  to  estimation. 

It  was  at  any  rate  impossible  to  have  been 
younger,  in  spite  of  whatever  inevitable  sub 
missions  to  the  rather  violent  push  forward 
at  certain  particular  points  and  on  lines 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  3 

corresponding  with  them,  than  I  found  my 
self,  from  the  first  day  of  March  1869,  in 
the  face  of  an  opportunity  that  affected  me 
then  and  there  as  the  happiest,  the  most 
interesting,  the  most  alluring  and  beguiling, 
that  could  ever  have  opened  before  a  some 
what  disabled  young  man  who  was  about  to 
complete  his  twenty-sixth  year.  Treasures 
of  susceptibility,  treasures  not  only  uncon 
scious  of  the  remotest  approach  to  exhaustion, 
but,  given  the  dazzling  possibilities,  posi 
tively  and  ideally  intact,  I  now  recognise — 
I  in  fact  long  ago  recognised — on  the  part 
of  that  intensely  "reacting"  small  organism; 
which  couldn't  have  been  in  higher  spirits 
or  made  more  inward  fuss  about  the  matter 
if  it  had  come  into  a  property  measured  not 
by  mere  impressions  and  visions,  occasions 
for  play  of  perception  and  imagination,  mind 
and  soul,  but  by  dollars  and  "shares,"  lands 
and  houses  or  flocks  and  herds.  It  is  to  the 
account  of  that  immense  fantastication  that 
I  set  down  a  state  of  mind  so  out  of  propor 
tion  to  anything  it  could  point  to  round 
about  save  by  the  vaguest  of  foolish-looking 


4  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

gestures;  and  it  would  perhaps  in  truth  be 
hard  to  say  whether  in  the  mixture  of  spirit 
and  sense  so  determined  the  fact  of  innocence 
or  that  of  intelligence  most  prevailed.  I 
like  to  recover  this  really  prodigious  flush — 
as  my  reader,  clearly,  must  perceive  I  do; 
I  like  fairly  to  hang  about  a  particular  small 
hour  of  that  momentous  March  day — which 
I  have  glanced  at  too,  I  believe,  on  some 
other  and  less  separated  page  than  this — for 
the  sake  of  the  extraordinary  gage  of  experi 
ence  that  it  seemed  on  the  spot  to  offer,  and 
that  I  had  but  to  take  straight  up:  my  life, 
on  so  complacently  near  a  view  as  I  now 
treat  myself  to,  having  veritably  consisted 
but  in  the  prolongation  of  that  act.  I  took 
up  the  gage,  and  as  I  look  back  the  fullest 
as  well  as  simplest  account  of  the  interval 
till  now  strikes  me  as  being  that  I  have  never, 
in  common  honour,  let  it  drop  again.  And 
the  small  hour  was  just  that  of  my  having 
landed  at  Liverpool  in  the  gusty,  cloudy, 
overwhelmingly  English  morning  and  pur 
sued,  with  immediate  intensities  of  appreci 
ation,  as  I  may  call  the  muffled  accompani- 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  5 

ment  for  fear  of  almost  indecently  overnaming 
it,  a  course  which  had  seated  me  at  a  late 
breakfast  in  the  coffee-room  of  the  old  Adelphi 
Hotel  ("Radley's,"  as  I  had  to  deplore  its 
lately  having  ceased  to  be  dubbed,)  and 
handed  me  over  without  a  scruple  to  my 
fate.  This  doom  of  inordinate  exposure  to 
appearances,  aspects,  images,  every  protru 
sive  item  almost,  in  the  great  beheld  sum  of 
things,  I  regard  in  other  words  as  having 
settled  upon  me  once  for  all  while  I  observed 
for  instance  that  in  England  the  plate  of 
buttered  muffin  and  its  cover  were  sacredly 
set  upon  the  slop-bowl  after  hot  water  had 
been  ingenuously  poured  into  the  same,  and 
had  seen  that  circumstance  in  a  perfect  cloud 
of  accompaniments.  I  must  have  had  with 
my  tea  and  my  muffin  a  boiled  egg  or  two 
and  a  dab  of  marmalade,  but  it  was  from  a 
far  other  store  of  condiments  I  most  liberally 
helped  myself.  I  was  lucidly  aware  of  so 
gorging — esoterically,  as  it  were,  while  I 
drew  out  the  gustatory  process;  and  I  must 
have  said  in  that  lost  reference  to  this  scene 
of  my  dedication  which  I  mentioned  above 


6  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

that  I  was  again  and  again  in  the  aftertime 
to  win  back  the  homeliest  notes  of  the  im 
pression,  the  damp  and  darksome  light  washed 
in  from  the  steep,  black,  bricky  street,  the 
crackle  of  the  strong  draught  of  the  British 
"sea-coal"  fire,  much  more  confident  of  its 
function,  I  thought,  than  the  fires  I  had  left, 
the  rustle  of  the  thick,  stiff,  loudly  unfolded 
and  refolded  "Times,"  the  incomparable 
truth  to  type  of  the  waiter,  truth  to  history, 
to  literature,  to  poetry,  to  Dickens,  to 
Thackeray,  positively  to  Smollett  and  to 
Hogarth,  to  every  connection  that  could  help 
me  to  appropriate  him  and  his  setting,  an 
arrangement  of  things  hanging  together  with 
a  romantic  Tightness  that  had  the  force  of  a 
revelation. 

To  what  end  appropriation  became  thus 
eager  and  romance  thus  easy  one  could  have 
asked  one's  self  only  if  the  idea  of  connecti- 
bility  as  stretching  away  and  away  hadn't  of 
a  sudden  taken  on  such  a  wealth  of  sugges 
tion;  it  represented  at  once  a  chain  stretch 
ing  off  to  heaven  knew  where,  but  far  into 
one's  future  at  least,  one's  possibilities  of 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  7 

life,  and  every  link  and  pulse  of  which  it 
was  going  accordingly  to  be  indispensable, 
besides  being  delightful  and  wonderful,  to 
recognise.  Recognition,  I  dare  say,  was 
what  remained,  through  the  adventure  of 
the  months  to  come,  the  liveliest  principle 
at  work;  both  as  bearing  on  the  already 
known,  on  things  unforgotten  and  of  a  sense 
intensely  cultivated  and  cherished  from  my 
younger  time,  and  on  the  imagined,  the  un- 
imagined  and  the  unimaginable,  a  quantity 
that  divided  itself  somehow  into  the  double 
muster  of  its  elements,  an  endless  vista  or 
waiting  array,  down  the  middle  of  which  I 
should  inconceivably  pass — inconceivably 
save  for  being  sure  of  some  thrilled  arrest, 
some  exchange  of  assurance  and  response, 
at  every  step.  Obviously  half  the  charm, 
as  I  can  but  thinly  describe  it,  of  the  sub 
stantially  continuous  experience  the  first 
passages  of  which  I  thus  note  was  in  the 
fact  that,  immensely  moved  by  it  as  I  was, 
and  having  so  to  deal  with  it — in  the  antic 
ipatory  way  or  to  the  whatevers  and  wher- 
evers  and  whenevers  within  me  that  should 


8  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

find  it  in  order — I  yet  felt  it  in  no  degree  as 
strange  or  obscure,  baffling  or  unrecognising 
on  its  own  side;  everything  was  so  far  from 
impenetrable  that  my  most  general  notion  was 
the  very  ecstasy  of  understanding  and  that 
really  wherever  I  looked,  and  still  more  wher 
ever  I  pressed,  I  sank  in  and  in  up  to  my  nose. 
This  in  particular  was  of  the  perfect  felicity, 
that  while  the  fact  of  difference  all  round 
me  was  immense  the  embarrassment  of  it 
was  nil — as  if  the  getting  into  relation  with 
the  least  waste  had  been  prepared  from  so 
far  back  that  a  sort  of  divine  economy  now 
fairly  ruled.  It  was  doubtless  a  part  of  the 
total  fatuity,  and  perhaps  its  sublimest  mark, 
that  I  knew  what  everything  meant,  not 
simply  then  but  for  weeks  and  months  after, 
and  was  to  know  less  only  with  increase  of 
knowledge.  That  must  indeed  have  been  of 
the  essence  of  the  general  effect  and  the 
particular  felicity — only  not  grotesque  be 
cause,  for  want  of  occasion,  not  immediately 
exhibited:  a  consciousness  not  other  than 
that  of  a  person  abruptly  introduced  into  a 
preoccupied  and  animated  circle  and  yet  so 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  9 

miraculously  aware  of  the  matters  conversed 
about  as  to  need  no  word  of  explanation 
before  joining  in.  To  say  of  such  a  person 
that  he  hadn't  lost  time  would,  I  knew,  be 
feebly  to  express  his  advantage;  my  likeness 
to  him,  at  any  rate,  probably  fell  short  of 
an  absurd  one  through  the  chapter  of  acci 
dents,  mostly  of  the  happiest  in  their  way 
too,  which,  restraining  the  personal  impulse 
for  me,  kept  appearances  and  pretensions 
down.  The  feast,  as  it  more  and  more  opened 
out,  was  all  of  the  objective,  as  we  have 
learned  so  comfortably  to  say;  or  at  least  of 
its  convenient  opposite  only  in  so  far  as  this 
undertook  to  interpret  it  for  myself  alone. 

To  return  at  all  across  the  years  to  the 
gates  of  the  paradise  of  the  first  larger  initia 
tions  is  to  be  ever  so  tempted  to  pass  them, 
to  push  in  again  and  breathe  the  air  of  this, 
that  and  the  other  plot  of  rising  ground  par 
ticularly  associated,  for  memory  and  grat 
itude,  with  the  quickening  process.  The 
trouble  is  that  with  these  sacred  spots,  to 
later  appreciation,  the  garden  of  youth  is 
apt  inordinately  to  bristle,  and  that  one's 


10  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

account  of  them  has  to  shake  them  together 
fairly  hard,  making  a  coherent  thing  of  them, 
to  profit  by  the  contribution  of  each.  In 
speaking  of  my  earliest  renewal  of  the  vision 
of  Europe,  if  I  may  give  so  grand  a  name  to 
a  scarce  more  than  merely  enlarged  and  up 
lifted  gape,  I  have,  I  confess,  truly  to  jerk 
myself  over  the  ground,  to  wrench  myself 
with  violence  from  memories  and  images, 
stages  and  phases  and  branching  arms,  that 
catch  and  hold  me  as  I  pass  them  by.  Such 
a  matter  as  my  recovery  of  contact  with 
London  for  a  few  weeks,  the  contact  broken 
off  some  nine  years  before,  lays  so  many 
plausible  traps  for  me  that  discretion  half 
warns  me  to  stand  off  the  ground  and  walk 
round  it  altogether.  I  stop  my  ears  to  the 
advice,  however,  under  the  pleading  reminder 
that  just  those  days  began  a  business  for  me 
that  was  to  go  ever  so  much  further  than  I 
then  dreamed  and  planted  a  seed  that  was, 
by  my  own  measure,  singularly  to  sprout 
and  flourish — the  harvest  of  which,  I  almost 
permit  myself  to  believe,  has  even  yet  not 
all  been  gathered.  I  foresee  moreover  how 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  11 

little  I  shall  be  able  to  resist,  throughout 
these  Notes,  the  force  of  persuasion  expressed 
in  the  individual  vivid  image  of  the  past  wher 
ever  encountered,  these  images  having  al 
ways  such  terms  of  their  own,  such  subtle 
secrets  and  insidious  arts  for  keeping  us  in 
relation  with  them,  for  bribing  us  by  the 
beauty,  the  authority,  the  wonder  of  their 
saved  intensity.  They  have  saved  it,  they 
seem  to  say  to  us,  from  such  a  welter  of  death 
and  darkness  and  ruin  that  this  alone  makes 
a  value  and  a  light  and  a  dignity  for  them, 
something  indeed  of  an  argument  that  our 
story,  since  we  attempt  to  tell  one,  has  lapses 
and  gaps  without  them.  Not  to  be  denied 
also,  over  and  above  this,  is  the  downright 
pleasure  of  the  illusion  yet  again  created, 
the  apparent  transfer  from  the  past  to  the 
present  of  the  particular  combination  of 
things  that  did  at  its  hour  ever  so  directly 
operate  and  that  isn't  after  all  then  drained 
of  virtue,  wholly  wasted  and  lost,  for  sensa 
tion,  for  participation  in  the  act  of  life,  in 
the  attesting  sights,  sounds,  smells,  the  il 
lusion,  as  I  say,  of  the  recording  senses. 


12  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

What  began,  during  the  springtime  of  my 
actual  reference,  in  a  couple  of  dusky  ground- 
floor  rooms  at  number  7  Half-Moon  Street, 
was  simply  an  establishment  all  in  a  few  days 
of  a  personal  relation  with  London  that  was 
not  of  course  measurable  at  the  moment — I 
saw  in  my  bedazzled  state  of  comparative 
freedom  too  many  other  relations  ahead,  a 
fairly  intoxicated  vision  of  choice  and  range 
— but  that  none  the  less  set  going  a  more 
intimately  inner  consciousness,  a  wheel  within 
the  wheels,  and  led  to  my  departing,  the 
actual,  the  general  incident  closed,  in  pos 
session  of  a  return-ticket  "good,"  as  we 
say,  for  a  longer  interval  than  I  could  then 
dream  about,  and  that  the  first  really  earnest 
fumble  of  after  years  brought  surprisingly  to 
light.  I  think  it  must  have  been  the  very 
proportions  themselves  of  the  invitation  and 
the  interest  that  kept  down,  under  the  im 
mense  impression,  everything  in  the  nature 
of  calculation  and  presumption;  dark,  huge 
and  prodigious  the  other  party  to  our  rela 
tion,  London's  and  mine,  as  I  called  it,  loomed 
and  spread — much  too  mighty  a  Goliath  for 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  13 

the  present  in  any  conceivable  ambition  even 
of  a  fast-growing  David.  My  earlier  appre 
hension,  fed  at  the  season  as  from  a  thousand 
outstretched  silver  spoons — for  these  all  shone 
to  me  with  that  effect  of  the  handsomest 
hospitality — piled  up  the  monster  to  such  a 
height  that  I  could  somehow  only  fear  him 
as  much  as  I  admired  and  that  his  propor 
tions  in  fact  reached  away  quite  beyond  my 
expectation.  He  was  always  the  great  figure 
of  London,  and  I  was  for  no  small  time,  as 
the  years  followed,  to  be  kept  at  my  awe 
struck  distance  for  taking  him  on  that  sort 
of  trust:  I  had  crept  about  his  ankles,  I  had 
glanced  adventurously  up  at  his  knees,  and 
wasn't  the  moral  for  the  most  part  the  mere 
question  of  whether  I  should  ever  be  big 
enough  to  so  much  as  guess  where  he  stopped  ? 
Odd  enough  was  it,  I  make  out,  that  I 
was  to  feel  no  wonder  of  that  kind  or  degree 
play  in  the  coming  time  over  such  other  social 
aspects,  such  superficially  more  colourable 
scenes  as  I  paid,  in  repetition  as  frequent  as 
possible,  my  respects  and  my  compliments 
to:  they  might  meet  me  with  wreathed 


14  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

smiles  and  splendid  promises  and  deep  divina 
tions  of  my  own  desire,  a  thousand  graces 
and  gages,  in  fine,  that  I  couldn't  pretend 
to  have  picked  up  within  the  circle,  however 
experimentally  widened,  of  which  Half -Moon 
Street  was  the  centre,  and  nothing  therefore 
could  have  exceeded  the  splendour  of  these 
successive  and  multiplied  assurances.  What 
it  none  the  less  infinitely  beguiles  me  to  recog 
nise  to-day  is  that  such  exhibitions,  for  all 
their  greater  direct  radiance,  and  still  more 
for  all  their  general  implication  of  a  store  of 
meaning  and  mystery  and  beauty  that  they 
alone,  from  example  to  example,  from  prodigy 
to  prodigy,  had  to  open  out,  left  me  com 
paratively  little  crushed  by  the  impression 
of  their  concerning  me  further  than  my  own 
action  perhaps  could  make  good.  It  was  as 
if  I  had  seen  that  all  there  was  for  me  of  these 
great  things  I  should  sooner  or  later  take; 
the  amount  would  be  immense,  yet,  as  who 
should  say,  all  on  the  same  plane  and  the 
same  connection,  the  aesthetic,  the  "artistic," 
the  romantic  in  the  looser  sense,  or  in  other 
words  in  the  air  of  the  passions  of  the  intel- 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  15 

ligence.  What  other  passions  of  a  deeper 
strain,  whether  personal  or  racial,  and  there 
by  more  superstitiously  importunate,  I  must 
have  felt  involved  in  the  question  of  an  effec 
tive  experience  of  English  life  I  was  doubtless 
then  altogether  unprepared  to  say;  it  prob 
ably  came,  however,  I  seem  actually  to  make 
out,  very  much  to  this  particular  percep 
tion,  exactly,  that  any  penetration  of  the 
London  scene  would  be  experience  after  a 
fashion  that  an  exercise  of  one's  "mere  in 
tellectual  curiosity"  wherever  else  wouldn't 
begin  to  represent,  glittering  as  the  rewards 
to  such  curiosity  amid  alien  peoples  of  genius 
might  thoroughly  appear.  On  the  other 
hand  it  was  of  course  going  to  be  nothing 
less  than  a  superlative  help  that  one  would 
have  but  to  reach  out  straight  and  in  the 
full  measure  of  one's  passion  for  these  rewards, 
to  find  one's  self  carried  all  the  way  by  one's 
active,  one's  contemplative  concern  with  them 
—this  delightful  affair,  fraught  with  increase 
of  light,  of  joy  and  wonder,  of  possibilities 
of  adventure  for  the  mind,  in  fine,  inevitably 
exhausting  the  relation. 


II 

E;T  me  not  here  withal  appear  to  pretend 
to  say  how  far  I  then  foresaw  myself 
likely  to  proceed,  as  it  were,  with  the  inimi 
table  France  and  the  incomparable  Italy;  my 
real  point  is  altogether  in  the  simple  fact 
that  they  hovered  before  me,  even  in  their 
scrappy  foretastes,  to  a  great  effect  of  ease 
and  inspiration,  whereas  I  shouldn't  at  all 
have  resented  the  charge  of  fairly  hiding 
behind  the  lowly  door  of  Mr.  Lazarus  Fox — 
so  unmistakeably  did  it  open  into  complica 
tions  tremendous.  This  excellent  man,  my 
Half-Moon  Street  landlord — I  surrender,  I 
can't  keep  away  from  him — figures  to  me  now 
as  but  one  of  the  thousand  forms  of  pressure 
in  the  collective  assault,  but  he  couldn't 
have  been  more  carefully  chosen  for  his  office 
had  he  consciously  undertaken  to  express 
to  me  in  a  concentrated  manner  most  of  the 
things  I  was  "after."  The  case  was  rather 
indeed  perhaps  that  he  himself  by  his  own 

16 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  17 

mere  perfection  put  me  up  to  much  of  what 
I  should  most  confidently  look  for,  and  that 
the  right  lines  of  observation  and  enjoy 
ment,  of  local  and  social  contact,  as  I  may 
call  it,  were  most  of  all  those  that  started 
out  from  him  and  came  back  to  him.  It 
was  as  if  nothing  I  saw  could  have  done 
without  him,  as  if  nothing  he  was  could  have 
done  without  everything  else.  The  very 
quarters  I  occupied  under  his  protection 
happened,  for  that  matter,  to  swarm — as  I 
estimated  swarming — with  intensities  of  sug 
gestion — aware  as  I  now  encourage  myself 
to  become  that  the  first  note  of  the  num 
berless  reverberations  I  was  to  pick  up  in 
the  aftertime  had  definitely  been  struck  for 
me  as  under  the  wave  of  his  conducting  little 
wand.  He  flourished  it  modestly  enough, 
ancient  worthy  of  an  immemorial  order  that 
he  was — old  pensioned  servant,  of  course, 
of  a  Cumberland  (as  I  believe)  family,  a 
kind,  slim,  celibate,  informing  and  informed 
member  of  which  occupied  his  second  floor 
apartments;  a  friend  indeed  whom  I  had 
met  on  the  very  first  occasion  of  my  sallying 


18  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

forth  from  Morley's  Hotel  in  Trafalgar  Square 
to  dine  at  a  house  of  sustaining,  of  inspiring 
hospitality  in  the  Kensington  quarter.  Suc 
cumbing  thus  to  my  tangle  of  memories,  from 
which  I  discern  no  escape,  I  recognise  further 
that  if  the  endlessly  befriending  Charles 
Nortons  introduced  me  to  Albert  Rutson, 
and  Albert  Rutson  introduced  me  to  his 
feudal  retainer,  so  it  was  in  no  small  degree 
through  the  confidence  borrowed  from  the 
latter's  interest  in  the  decent  appearance  I 
should  make,  an  interest  of  a  consistency  not 
to  have  been  prefigured  by  any  at  all  like 
instance  in  my  past,  that  I  so  far  maintained 
my  dizzy  balance  as  to  be  able  to  ascend  to 
the  second  floor  under  the  thrill  of  sundry 
invitations  to  breakfast.  I  dare  say  it  is  the 
invitations  to  breakfast  that  hold  me  at  this 
moment  by  their  spell — so  do  they  breathe 
to  me  across  the  age  the  note  of  a  London 
world  that  we  have  left  far  behind;  in  con 
sequence  of  which  I  the  more  yearningly 
steal  back  to  it,  as  on  sneaking  tiptoe,  and 
shut  myself  up  there  without  interference. 
It  is  embalmed  in  disconnections,  in  dif- 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  19 

ferences,  that  I  cultivate  a  free  fancy  for 
pronouncing  advantageous  to  it:  sunk  al 
ready  was  the  shaft  by  which  I  should  descend 
into  the  years,  and  my  inspiration  is  in  touch 
ing  as  many  as  possible  of  the  points  of  the 
other  tradition,  retracing  as  many  as  possible 
of  the  features  of  the  old  face,  eventually 
to  be  blurred  again  even  before  my  own  eyes, 
and  with  the  materials  for  a  portrait  thereby 
accessible  but  to  those  who  were  present 
up  to  the  time  of  the  change. 

I  don't  pretend  to  date  this  change  which 
still  allows  me  to  catch  my  younger  ob 
servation  and  submission  at  play  on  the  far 
side  of  it;  I  make  it  fall  into  the  right  per 
spective,  however,  I  think,  when  I  place  it 
where  I  began  to  shudder  before  a  confidence, 
not  to  say  an  impudence,  of  diminution  in 
the  aspects  by  which  the  British  capital 
differed  so  from  those  of  all  the  foreign  to 
gether  as  to  present  throughout  the  straight 
contradiction  to  them.  That  straight  con 
tradiction,  testifying  invaluably  at  every 
turn,  had  been  from  far  back  the  thing,  ro 
mantically  speaking,  to  clutch  and  keep  the 


20  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

clue  and  the  logic  of;  thanks  to  it  the  whole 
picture,  every  element,  objects  and  figures, 
background  and  actors,  nature  and  art,  hung 
consummately  together,  appealing  in  their 
own  light  and  under  their  own  law — interest 
ing  ever  in  every  case  by  instituting  com 
parisons,  sticking  on  the  contrary  to  their 
true  instinct  and  suggesting  only  contrast. 
They  were  the  opposite,  the  assured,  the  ab 
solute,  the  unashamed,  in  respect  to  what 
ever  might  be  of  a  generally  similar  inten 
tion  elsewhere:  this  was  their  dignity,  their 
beauty  and  their  strength — to  look  back  on 
which  is  to  wonder  if  one  didn't  quite  con 
sciously  tremble,  before  the  exhibition,  for 
any  menaced  or  mitigated  symptom  in  it. 
I  honestly  think  one  did,  even  in  the  first 
flushes  of  recognition,  more  or  less  so  tremble; 
I  remember  at  least  that  in  spite  of  such  dis- 
concertments,  such  dismays,  as  certain  of 
the  most  thoroughly  Victorian  choses  vues 
originally  treated  me  to,  something  yet  deeper 
and  finer  than  observation  admonished  me 
to  like  them  just  as  they  were,  or  at  least 
not  too  fatuouslv  to  dislike — since  it  some- 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  21 

how  glimmered  upon  me  that  if  they  had 
lacked  their  oddity,  their  monstrosity,  as 
it  even  might  be,  their  unabashed  insular 
conformity,  other  things  that  belong  to  them, 
as  they  belong  to  these,  might  have  loomed 
less  large  and  massed  less  thick,  which  effect 
was  wholly  to  be  deprecated.  To  catch  that 
secret,  I  make  out  the  more  I  think  of  it, 
was  to  have  perhaps  the  smokiest,  but  none 
the  less  the  steadiest,  light  to  walk  by;  the 
"clue,"  as  I  have  called  it,  was  to  be  one's 
appreciation  of  an  England  that  should  turn 
its  back  directly  enough,  and  without  fear 
of  doing  it  too  much,  on  examples  and  ideas 
not  strictly  homebred — since  she  did  her  own 
sort  of  thing  with  such  authority  and  was 
even  then  to  be  noted  as  sometimes  trying 
other  people's  with  a  kind  of  disaster  not 
recorded,  at  the  worst,  among  themselves. 

I  must  of  course  disavow  pretending  to 
have  read  this  vivid  philosophy  into  my 
most  immediate  impressions,  and  I  may  in 
fact  perhaps  not  claim  to  have  been  really 
aware  of  its  seed  till  a  considerable  time  had 
passed,  till  apprehensions  and  reflections  had 


22  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

taken  place  in  quantity,  immeasurable 
quantity,  so  to  speak,  and  a  great  stir-up 
of  the  imagination  been  incurred.  Un 
doubtedly  is  it  in  part  the  new — that  is, 
more  strictly,  the  elder — acuteness  that  I 
touch  all  the  prime  profit  with;  I  didn't 
know  at  the  time  either  how  much  appear 
ances  were  all  the  while  in  the  melting-pot 
or  what  wealth  of  reaction  on  them  I  was 
laying  up.  I  cherish,  for  love  of  the  unbroken 
interest,  all  the  same,  the  theory  of  certain 
then  positive  and  effective  prefigurements, 
because  it  leaves  me  thus  free  for  remarking 
that  I  knew  where  I  was,  as  I  may  put  it, 
from  the  moment  I  saw  the  state  of  the 
London  to  come  brought  down  with  the 
weight  of  her  abdication  of  her  genius.  It 
not  unnaturally  may  be  said  that  it  hasn't 
been  till  to-day  that  we  see  her  genius  in  its 
fulness — throwing  up  in  a  hundred  lights, 
matters  we  practically  acknowledge,  such  a 
plastic  side  as  we  had  never  dreamed  she 
possessed.  The  genius  of  accommodation  is 
what  we  had  last  expected  of  her — accom 
modation  to  anything  but  her  portentous 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  23 

self,  for  in  that  connection  she  was  ever  re 
markable;  and  certainly  the  air  of  the  gen 
eralised,  the  emulous  smart  modern  capital 
has  come  to  be  written  upon  her  larger  and 
larger  even  while  we  look. 

The  unaccommodating  and  unaccommo 
dated  city  remains  none  the  less  closely 
consecrated  to  one's  fondest  notion  of  her — 
the  city  too  indifferent,  too  proud,  too  un 
aware,  too  stupid  even  if  one  will,  to  enter 
any  lists  that  involved  her  moving  from  her 
base  and  that  thereby,  when  one  approached 
her  from  the  alien  positive  places  (I  don't 
speak  of  the  American,  in  those  days  too 
negative  to  be  related  at  all)  enjoyed  the 
enormous  "pull,"  for  making  her  impression, 
of  ignoring  everything  but  her  own  perversi 
ties  and  then  of  driving  these  home  with  an 
emphasis  not  to  be  gainsaid.  Since  she 
didn't  emulate,  as  I  have  termed  it,  so  she 
practised  her  own  arts  altogether,  and  both 
these  ways  and  these  consequences  were  in 
the  flattest  opposition  (that  was  the  happy 
point !)  to  foreign  felicities  or  foreign  standards, 
so  that  the  effect  in  every  case  was  of  the 


24  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

straightest  reversal  of  them — with  black  for 
the  foreign  white  and  white  for  the  foreign 
black,  wet  for  the  foreign  dry  and  dry  for 
the  foreign  wet,  big  for  the  foreign  small  and 
small  for  the  foreign  big:  I  needn't  extend 
the  catalogue.  Her  idiosyncrasy  was  never  in 
the  least  to  have  been  inferred  or  presumed; 
it  could  only,  in  general,  make  the  outsider 
provisionally  gape.  She  sat  thus  imperturb 
able  in  her  felicities,  and  if  that  is  how,  re 
mounting  the  stream  of  time,  I  like  most  to 
think  of  her,  this  is  because  if  her  interest 
is  still  undeniable — as  that  of  overgrown 
things  goes — it  has  yet  lost  its  fineness  of 
quality.  Phenomena  may  be  interesting, 
thank  goodness,  without  being  phenomena 
of  elegant  expression  or  of  any  other  form 
of  restless  smartness,  and  when  once  type 
is  strong,  when  once  it  plays  up  from  deep 
sources,  every  show  of  its  sincerity  delivers 
us  a  message  and  we  hang,  to  real  suspense, 
on  its  continuance  of  energy,  on  its  again 
and  yet  again  consistently  acquitting  itself. 
So  it  keeps  in  tune,  and,  as  the  French  adage 
says,  c'est  le  ton  qui  fait  la  chanson.  The 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  25 

mid- Victorian  London  was  sincere — that  was 
a  vast  virtue  and  a  vast  appeal;  the  con 
temporary  is  sceptical,  and  most  so  when 
most  plausible;  the  turn  of  the  tide  could 
verily  be  fixed  to  an  hour — the  hour  at  which 
the  new  plausibility  began  to  exceed  the  old 
sincerities  by  so  much  as  a  single  sign.  They 
could  truly  have  been  arrayed  face  to  face, 
I  think,  for  an  attentive  eye — and  I  risk  even 
saying  that  my  own,  bent  upon  them,  as  was 
to  come  to  pass,  with  a  habit  of  anxiety  that 
I  should  scarce  be  able  to  overstate,  had  its 
unrecorded  penetrations,  its  alarms  and  re 
coveries,  even  perhaps  its  very  lapses  of  faith, 
though  always  redeemed  afresh  by  still  fonder 
fanaticisms,  to  a  pitch  that  shall  perhaps 
present  itself,  when  they  expose  it  all  the 
way,  as  that  of  tiresome  extravagance.  Ex 
posing  it  all  the  way  is  none  the  less,  I  see, 
exactly  what  I  plot  against  it — or,  otherwise 
expressed,  in  favour  of  the  fine  truth  of  his 
tory,  so  far  as  a  throb  of  that  awful  pulse 
has  been  matter  of  one's  own  life;  in  favour 
too  of  the  mere  returns  derivable  from  more 
inordinate  curiosity.  These  Notes  would 


26  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

enjoy  small  self-respect,  I  think,  if  that  prin 
ciple,  not  to  call  it  that  passion,  didn't  almost 
furiously  ride  them. 


m 

I  WAS  at  any  rate  in  the  midst  of  sincerities 
enough,  sincerities  of  emphasis  and  "com 
position";  perversities,  idiosyncrasies,  incal- 
culabilities,  delightful  all  as  densities  at  first 
insoluble,  delightful  even  indeed  as  so  much 
mere  bewilderment  and  shock.  When  was 
the  shock,  I  ask  myself  as  I  look  back,  not 
so  deadened  by  the  general  atmospheric  rich 
ness  as  not  to  melt  more  or  less  immediately 
into  some  succulence  for  the  mind,  something 
that  could  feed  the  historic  sense  almost  to 
sweetness  ?  I  don't  mean  that  it  was  a  shock 
to  be  invited  to  breakfast — there  were 
stronger  ones  than  that;  but  was  in  fact 
the  trait  de  mceurs  that  disconnected  me  with 
most  rapidity  and  intensity  from  all  I  had 
left  on  the  other  side  of  the  sea.  To  be  so 
disconnected,  for  the  time,  and  in  the  most 
insidious  manner,  was  above  all  what  I  had 
come  out  for,  and  every  appearance  that 
might  help  it  was  to  be  artfully  and  grate- 

27 


28  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

fully  cultivated.  I  recollect  well  how  many 
of  these  combined  as  I  sat  at  quite  punctual 
fried  sole  and  marmalade  in  the  compara 
tively  disengaged  sitting-room  of  the  second 
floor — the  occupancy  of  the  first  has  remained 
vague  to  me;  disengaged  from  the  mantle  of 
gloom  the  folds  of  which  draped  most  heavily 
the  feet  of  the  house,  as  it  were,  and  thereby 
promoted  in  my  own  bower  the  chronic  dusk 
favourable  to  mural  decoration  consisting 
mainly  of  framed  and  glazed  "coloured" 
excisions  from  Christmas  numbers  of  the 
Illustrated  London  News  that  had  been  at 
their  hour  quite  modern  miracles.  Was  it 
for  that  matter  into  a  sudden  splendour  of 
the  modern  that  I  ascendingly  emerged  under 
the  hospitality  of  my  kind  fellow-tenant,  or 
was  it  rather  into  the  fine  classicism  of  a  by 
gone  age,  as  literature  and  the  arts  had  handed 
down  that  memory  ?  Such  were  the  questions 
whisked  at  every  turn  under  my  nose  and  re 
ducing  me  by  their  obscure  charm  but  to 
bewildered  brooding,  I  fear,  when  I  should 
have  been  myself,  to  repay  these  attentions, 
quite  forward  and  informing  and  affirmative. 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  29 

There  were  eminent  gentlemen,  as  I  was 
sure  they  could  only  be,  to  "meet"  and, 
alas,  awfully  to  interrogate  me — for  vivid 
has  remained  to  me,  as  the  best  of  my  be 
wilderment,  the  strangeness  of  finding  that 
I  could  be  of  interest  to  them:  not  indeed 
to  call  it  rather  the  proved  humiliation  of 
my  impotence.  My  identity  for  myself  was 
all  in  my  sensibility  to  their  own  exhibition, 
with  not  a  scrap  left  over  for  a  personal  show; 
which  made  it  as  inconvenient  as  it  was  queer 
that  I  should  be  treated  as  a  specimen  and 
have  in  the  most  unexpected  manner  to 
prove  that  I  was  a  good  one.  I  knew  myself 
the  very  worst  conceivable,  but  how  to  give 
to  such  other  persons  a  decent  or  coherent 
reason  for  my  being  so  required  more  presence 
of  mind  than  I  could  in  the  least  muster — 
the  consequence  of  which  failure  had  to  be 
for  me,  I  fear,  under  all  that  confused  first 
flush,  rather  an  abject  acceptance  of  the  air 
of  imbecility.  There  were,  it  appeared,  things 
of  interest  taking  place  in  America,  and  I 
had  had,  in  this  absurd  manner,  to  come  to 
England  to  learn  it:  I  had  had  over  there 


30  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

on  the  ground  itself  no  conception  of  any 
such  matter — nothing  of  the  smallest  in 
terest,  by  any  perception  of  mine,  as  I  sup 
pose  I  should  still  blush  to  recall,  had  taken 
place  in  America  since  the  War.  How  could 
anything,  I  really  wanted  to  ask — anything 
comparable,  that  is,  to  what  was  taking  place 
under  my  eyes  in  Half-Moon  Street  and  at 
dear  softly  presiding  Rutson's  table  of  talk. 
It  doubtless  essentially  belonged  to  the  ex 
actly  right  type  and  tone  and  general  figure 
of  my  fellow-breakfasters  from  the  Temple, 
from  the  Home  Office,  the  Foreign  Office, 
the  House  of  Commons,  from  goodness  knew 
what  other  scarce  discernible  Olympian  alti 
tudes,  it  belonged  to  the  very  cut  of  their 
hair  and  their  waistcoats  and  their  whiskers 
— for  it  was  still  more  or  less  a  whiskered 
age — that  they  should  desire  from  me  much 
distinctness  about  General  Grant's  first 
cabinet,  upon  the  formation  of  which  the 
light  of  the  newspaper  happened  then  to 
beat;  yet  at  the  same  time  that  I  asked 
myself  if  it  was  to  such  cold  communities, 
such  flat  frustrations  as  were  so  proposed, 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  31 

that  I  had  sought  to  lift  my  head  again  in 
European  air,  I  found  the  crisis  enriched  by 
sundry  other  apprehensions. 

They  melted  together  in  it  to  that  increase 
of  savour  I  have  already  noted,  yet  leaving 
me  vividly  admonished  that  the  blankness  of 
my  mind  as  to  the  Washington  candidates 
relegated  me  to  some  class  unencountered  as 
yet  by  any  one  of  my  conversers,  a  class  only 
not  perfectly  ridiculous  because  perfectly  in 
significant.  Also  that  politics  walked  abroad 
in  England,  so  that  one  might  supremely 
bump  against  them,  as  much  as,  by  my  fond 
impression,  they  took  their  exercise  in  America 
but  through  the  back  streets  and  the  ways 
otherwise  untrodden  and  the  very  darkness 
of  night;  that  further  all  lively  attestations 
were  ipso  facto  interesting,  and  that  finally 
and  in  the  supreme  degree,  the  authenticity 
of  whatever  one  was  going  to  learn  in  the 
world  would  probably  always  have  for  its 
sign  that  one  got  it  at  some  personal  cost. 
To  this  generalisation  mightn't  one  even  add 
that  in  proportion  as  the  cost  was  great,  or 
became  fairly  excruciating,  the  lesson,  the 


32  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

value  acquired  would  probably  be  a  thing 
to  treasure?  I  remember  really  going  so  far 
as  to  wonder  if  any  act  of  acquisition  of  the 
life-loving,  life-searching  sort  that  most  ap 
pealed  to  me  wouldn't  mostly  be  fallacious 
if  unaccompanied  by  that  tag  of  the  price 
paid  in  personal  discomfort,  in  some  self- 
exposure  and  some  none  too  impossible  con 
sequent  discomfiture,  for  the  sake  of  it. 
Didn't  I  even  on  occasion  mount  to  the  very 
height  of  seeing  it  written  that  these  bad 
moments  were  the  downright  consecration 
of  knowledge,  that  is  of  perception  and, 
essentially,  of  exploration,  always  dangerous 
and  treacherous,  and  so  might  afterwards 
come  to  figure  to  memory,  each  in  its  order, 
as  the  silver  nail  on  the  wall  of  the  temple 
where  the  trophy  is  hung  up?  All  of  which 
remark,  I  freely  grant,  is  a  great  ado  about 
the  long  since  so  bedimmed  little  Half -Moon 
Street  breakfasts,  and  is  moreover  quite  wide 
of  the  mark  if  suggesting  that  the  joys  of 
recognition,  those  of  imaginatively,  of  pro- 
jectively  fitting  in  and  fitting  out  every  piece 
in  the  puzzle  and  every  recruit  to  the  force 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  38 

of  a  further  understanding  weren't  in  them 
selves  a  most  bustling  and  cheering  business. 
It  was  bustling  at  least,  assuredly,  if  not 
quite  always  in  the  same  degree  exhilarating, 
to  breakfast  out  at  all,  as  distinguished  from 
lunching,  without  its  being  what  the  Harvard 
scene  made  of  it,  one  of  the  incidents  of 
"boarding";  it  was  association  at  a  jump 
with  the  ghosts  of  Byron  and  Sheridan  and 
Scott  and  Moore  and  Lockhart  and  Rogers 
and  tutti  quanti — as  well  as  the  exciting  note 
of  a  social  order  in  which  everyone  wasn't 
hurled  straight,  with  the  momentum  of  rising, 
upon  an  office  or  a  store.  The  mere  vision 
in  numbers  of  persons  embodying  and  in 
various  ways  sharply  illustrating  a  clear 
alternative  to  that  passivity  told  a  tale  that 
would  be  more  and  more  worth  the  reading 
with  every  turn  of  the  page.  So  at  all  events 
I  fantasticated  while  harassed  by  my  neces 
sity  to  weave  into  my  general  tapestry  every 
thread  that  would  conduce  to  a  pattern,  and 
so  the  thread  for  instance  of  the  great  little 
difference  of  my  literally  never  having  but 
once  "at  home"  been  invited  to  breakfast 


34  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

on  types  as  well  as  on  toast  and  its  accessories 
could  suggest  an  effect  of  silk  or  silver  when 
absolutely  dangled  before  me.  That  single 
occasion  at  home  came  back  in  a  light  that 
fairly  brought  tears  to  my  eyes,  for  it  was 
touching  now  to  the  last  wanness  that  the 
lady  of  the  winter  morn  of  the  Massachusetts 
Sabbath,  one  of  those,  as  I  recover  it,  of  1868, 
to  reach  whose  board  we  had  waded  through 
snowdrifts,  had  been  herself  fondling  a 
reminiscence,  though  I  can  scarce  imagine 
supposing  herself  to  offer  for  our  consump 
tion  any  other  type  than  her  own.  It  was 
for  that  matter  but  the  sweet  staleness  of 
her  reminiscence  that  made  her  a  type,  and 
I  remember  how  it  had  had  to  do  thereby 
all  the  work:  she,  of  an  age  to  reach  so  con 
siderably  back,  had  breakfasted  out,  in 
London,  and  with  Mr.  Rogers  himself — that 
was  the  point;  which  I  am  bound  to  say  did 
for  the  hour  and  on  that  spot  supply  richness 
of  reference  enough.  And  I  am  caught  up, 
I  find,  in  the  very  act  of  this  claim  for  my 
prior  scantness  of  experience  by  a  memory 
that  makes  it  not  a  little  less  perfect  and 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  35 

which  is  oddly  enough  again  associated  with 
a  struggle,  on  an  empty  stomach,  through 
the  massed  New  England  whiteness  of  the 
prime  Sunday  hour.  I  still  cherish  the  vision, 
which  couldn't  then  have  faded  from  me,  of 
my  having,  during  the  age  of  innocence — I 
mean  of  my  own — breakfasted  with  W.  D. 
Howells,  insidious  disturber  and  fertiliser  of 
that  state  in  me,  to  "meet"  Bayard  Taylor 
and  Arthur  Sedgwick  all  in  the  Venetian 
manner,  the  delightful  Venetian  manner  which 
toward  the  later  'sixties  draped  any  motion 
on  our  host's  part  as  with  a  habit  still  ap 
propriate.  He  had  risen  that  morning  under 
the  momentum  of  his  but  recently  concluded 
consular  term  in  Venice,  where  margin,  if 
only  that  of  the  great  loungeable  piazza, 
had  a  breadth,  and  though  Sedgwick  and  I 
had  rather,  as  it  were,  to  take  the  jump  stand 
ing,  this  was  yet  under  the  inspiration  of 
feeling  the  case  most  special.  Only  it  had 
been  Venetian,  snow-shoes  and  all;  I  had 
stored  it  sacredly  away  as  not  American  at 
all,  and  was  of  course  to  learn  in  Half-Moon 
Street  how  little  it  had  been  English  either. 


36  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

What  must  have  seemed  to  me  of  a  fine 
international  mixture,  during  those  weeks, 
was  my  thrilling  opportunity  to  sit  one  morn 
ing,  beside  Mrs.  Charles  Norton's  tea-urn, 
in  Queen's  Gate  Terrace,  opposite  to  Frederic 
Harrison,  eminent  to  me  at  the  moment  as 
one  of  the  subjects  of  Matthew  Arnold's 
early  fine  banter,  one  of  his  too  confidently 
roaring  "young  lions"  of  the  periodical  press. 
Has  any  gilding  ray  since  that  happy  season 
rested  here  and  there  with  the  sovereign 
charm  of  interest,  of  drollery,  of  felicity  and 
infelicity  taken  on  by  scattered  selected  ob 
jects  in  that  writer's  bright  critical  dawn? — 
an  element  in  which  we  had  the  sense  of  sitting 
gratefully  bathed,  so  that  we  fairly  took  out 
our  young  minds  and  dabbled  and  soaked 
them  in  it  as  we  were  to  do  again  in  no  other. 
The  beauty  was  thus  at  such  a  rate  that 
people  had  references,  and  that  a  reference 
was  then,  to  my  mind,  whether  in  a  person 
or  an  object,  the  most  glittering,  the  most 
becoming  ornament  possible,  a  style  of  decora 
tion  one  seemed  likely  to  perceive  figures 
here  and  there,  whether  animate  or  not, 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  37 

quite  groan  under  the  accumulation  and  the 
weight  of.  One  had  scarcely  met  it  before 
— that  I  now  understood;  at  the  same  time 
that  there  was  perhaps  a  wan  joy  in  one's 
never  having  missed  it,  by  all  appearance, 
having  on  the  contrary  ever  instinctively 
caught  it,  on  the  least  glimmer  of  its  pres 
ence.  Even  when  present,  or  what  in  the 
other  time  I  had  taken  for  present,  it  had 
been  of  the  thinnest,  whereas  all  about  me 
hereafter  it  would  be  by  all  appearance  al 
most  glutinously  thick — to  the  point  even 
of  one's  on  occasion  sticking  fast  in  it;  that 
is  finding  intelligibility  smothered  in  quan 
tity.  I  lost  breath  in  fact,  no  doubt,  again 
and  again,  with  this  latter  increase,  but  was 
to  go  on  and  on  for  a  long  time  before  any 
first  glimmer  of  reaction  against  so  special 
a  source  of  interest.  It  attached  itself  to 
objects  often,  I  saw,  by  no  merit  or  virtue — 
above  all,  repeatedly,  by  no  "cleverness" — 
of  their  own,  but  just  by  the  luck  of  history, 
by  the  action  of  multiplicity  of  circumstance. 
Condemned  the  human  particle  "over  here" 
was  to  live,  on  whatever  terms,  in  thickness 


38  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

— instead  of  being  free,  comparatively,  or  as 
I  at  once  ruefully  and  exquisitely  found 
myself,  only  to  feel  and  to  think  in  it.  Rue 
fully  because  there  were  clearly  a  thousand 
contacts  and  sensations,  of  the  strong  direct 
order,  that  one  lost  by  not  so  living;  ex 
quisitely  because  of  the  equal  number  of 
immunities  and  independences,  blest  inde 
pendences  of  perception  and  judgment,  blest 
liberties  of  range  for  the  intellectual  adven 
ture,  that  accrued  by  the  same  stroke.  These 
at  least  had  the  advantage,  one  of  the  most 
distinguished  conceivable,  that  when  enjoyed 
with  a  certain  intensity  they  might  produce 
the  illusion  of  the  other  intensity,  that  of 
being  involved  in  the  composition  and  the 
picture  itself,  in  the  situations,  the  complica 
tions,  the  circumstances,  admirable  and 
dreadful;  while  no  corresponding  illusion, 
none  making  for  the  ideal  play  of  reflection, 
conclusion,  comparison,  however  one  should 
incline  to  appraise  the  luxury,  seemed  likely 
to  attend  the  immersed  or  engaged  condi 
tion. 

Whatever  fatuity  might  at  any  rate  have 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  39 

resided  in  these  complacencies  of  view,  I 
made  them  my  own  with  the  best  conscience 
in  the  world,  and  I  meet  them  again  quite 
to  extravagance  of  interest  wherever  on  the 
whole  extent  of  the  scene  my  retrospect  sets 
me  down.  It  wasn't  in  the  least  at  the  same 
time  that  encountered  celebrities  only  thus 
provoked  the  shifting  play  of  my  small  lamp, 
and  this  too  even  though  they  were  easily 
celebrated,  by  my  measure,  and  though  from 
the  very  first  I  owed  an  individual  here  and 
there  among  them,  as  was  highly  proper,  the 
benefit  of  impression  at  the  highest  pitch.  On 
the  great  supporting  and  enclosing  scene  itself, 
the  big  generalised  picture,  painted  in  layer 
upon  layer  and  tone  upon  tone,  one's  fancy 
was  all  the  while  feeding;  objects  and  items, 
illustrations  and  aspects  might  perpetually 
overlap  or  mutually  interfere,  but  never 
without  leaving  consistency  the  more  marked 
and  character  the  more  unmistakeable.  The 
place,  the  places,  bristled  so  for  every  glance 
with  expressive  particulars,  that  I  really 
conversed  with  them,  at  happy  moments, 
more  than  with  the  figures  that  moved  in 


40  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

them,  which  affected  me  so  often  as  but 
submissive  articles  of  furniture,  "put  in" 
by  an  artist  duly  careful  of  effect  and  yet 
duly  respectful  of  proportion.  The  great 
impression  was  doubtless  no  other  then  and 
there  than  what  it  is  under  every  sky  and 
before  every  scene  that  remind  one  afresh, 
at  the  given  moment,  of  all  the  ways  in  which 
producing  causes  and  produced  creatures 
correspond  and  interdepend;  but  I  think 
I  must  have  believed  at  that  time  that  these 
cross  references  kept  up  their  game  in  the 
English  air  with  a  frankness  and  a  good  faith 
that  kept  the  process,  in  all  probability,  the 
most  traceable  of  its  kind  on  the  globe. 

What  was  the  secret  of  the  force  of  that 
suggestion? — which  was  not,  I  may  say,  to 
be  invalidated,  to  my  eyes,  by  the  further 
observation  of  cases  and  conditions.  Was  it 
that  the  enormous  "pull"  enjoyed  at  every 
point  of  the  general  surface  the  stoutness  of 
the  underlying  belief  in  what  was  behind 
all  surfaces? — so  that  the  particular  visible, 
audible,  palpable  fact,  however  small  and 
subsidiary,  was  incomparably  absolute,  or 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  41 

had,  so  to  speak,  such  a  conscience  and  a 
confidence,  such  an  absence  of  reserve  and 
latent  doubts  about  itself,  as  was  not  else 
where  to  be  found.  Didn't  such  elements 
as  that  represent,  in  the  heart  of  things, 
possibilities  of  scepticism,  of  mockery,  of 
irony,  of  the  return  of  the  matter,  whatever 
it  might  be,  on  itself,  by  some  play  or  other 
of  the  questioning  spirit,  the  spirit  therefore 
weakening  to  entire  comfort  of  affirmations? 
Didn't  I  see  that  humour  itself,  which  might 
seem  elsewhere  corrosive  and  subversive, 
was,  as  an  English  faculty,  turned  outward 
altogether  and  never  turned  inward? — by 
which  convenient  circumstance  subversion, 
or  in  other  words  alteration  and  variation 
were  not  promoted.  Such  truths  were  won 
drous  things  to  make  out  in  such  connec 
tions  as  my  experience  was  then,  and  for  no 
small  time  after,  to  be  confined  to;  but  I 
positively  catch  myself  listening  to  them, 
even  with  my  half-awakened  ears,  as  if  they 
had  been  all  so  many  sermons  of  the  very 
stones  of  London.  There,  to  come  back  to 
it,  was  exactly  the  force  with  which  these 


42  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

stones  were  to  build  me  capaciously  round: 
I  invited  them,  I  besought  them,  to  say  all 
they  would,  and — to  return  to  my  figure  of 
a  while  back — it  was  soon  so  thoroughly  as 
if  they  had  understood  that,  once  having 
begun,  they  were  to  keep  year  after  year 
fairly  chattering  to  me.  Many  of  these 
pages,  I  fondly  foresee,  must  consist  but  of 
the  record  of  their  chatter.  What  was  most 
of  all  happening,  I  take  it,  was  that  under 
an  absurd  special  stress  I  was  having,  as 
who  should  say,  to  improvise  a  local  medium 
and  to  arrange  a  local  consciousness.  Against 
my  due  appropriation  of  those  originally 
closest  at  my  hand  inevitable  accidents  had 
conspired — and,  to  conclude  in  respect  to  all 
this,  if  a  considerable  time  was  to  be  wanted, 
in  the  event,  for  ideal  certainty  of  adjust 
ment,  half  the  terms  required  by  this  could 
then  put  forth  the  touching  plea  that  they 
had  quite  achingly  waited. 


IV 

TT  may  perhaps  seem  strange  that  the  soil 
-••  should  have  been  watered  by  such  an 
incident  as  Mr.  Lazarus  Fox's  reply,  in  the 
earliest  rich  dusk,  to  my  inquiry  as  to  whither, 
while  I  occupied  his  rooms,  I  had  best  be 
take  myself  most  regularly  for  my  dinner: 
"Well,  there  is  the  Bath  Hotel,  sir,  a  very 
short  walk  away,  where  I  should  think  you 
would  be  very  comfortable  indeed.  Mr. 
So-and-So  dines  at  his  club,  sir — but  there 
is  also  the  Albany  in  Piccadilly,  to  which  I 
believe  many  gentlemen  go."  I  think  I 
measured  on  the  spot  "all  that  it  took"  to 
make  my  friend  most  advisedly — for  it  was 
clearly  what  he  did — see  me  seated  in  lone 
state,  for  my  evening  meal,  at  the  heavy 
mahogany  of  the  stodgy  little  hotel  that  in 
those  days  and  for  long  after  occupied  the 
north-west  corner  of  Arlington  Street  and  to 
which,  in  common  with  many  compatriots, 
I  repeatedly  resorted  during  the  years  imme- 

43 


44  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

diately  following.  We  suffered,  however,  on 
those  occasions,  the  unmitigated  coffee-room 
of  Mr.  Fox's  prescription — it  was  part  of  a 
strange  inevitability,  a  concomitant  of  neces 
sary  shelter  and  we  hadn't  at  least  gone  forth 
to  invoke  its  austere  charm.  I  tried  it,  in 
that  singular  way,  at  the  hour  I  speak  of— 
and  I  well  remember  forecasting  the  interest 
of  a  social  and  moral  order  in  which  it  could 
be  supposed  of  me  that,  having  tried  it  once, 
I  should  sublimely  try  it  again.  My  success 
in  doing  so  would  indeed  have  been  sublime, 
but  a  finer  shade  of  the  quality  still  attached 
somehow  to  my  landlord's  confidence  in  it; 
and  this  was  one  of  the  threads  that,  as  I 
have  called  them,  I  was  to  tuck  away  for 
future  picking-up  again  and  unrolling.  I 
fell  back  on  the  Albany,  which  long  ago 
passed  away  and  which  I  seem  to  have  brushed 
with  a  touch  of  reminiscence  in  some  antici 
pation  of  the  present  indulgence  that  is  itself 
quite  ancient  history.  It  was  a  small  eating- 
house  of  the  very  old  English  tradition,  as  I 
then  supposed  at  least,  just  opposite  the 
much  greater  establishment  of  the  same 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  45 

name,  which  latter  it  had  borrowed,  and  I 
remember  wondering  whether  the  tenants  of 
the  classic  chambers,  the  beadle-guarded 
cluster  of  which  was  impressive  even  to  the 
deprecated  approach,  found  their  conception 
of  the  "restaurant" — we  still  pronounced 
it  in  the  French  manner — met  by  the  small 
compartments,  narrow  as  horse-stalls,  formed 
by  the  high  straight  backs  of  hard  wooden 
benches  and  accommodating  respectively  two 
pairs  of  feeders,  who  were  thus  so  closely 
face  to  face  as  fairly  to  threaten  with  knife 
and  fork  each  others'  more  forward  features. 
The  scene  was  sordid,  the  arrangements 
primitive,  the  detail  of  the  procedure,  as  it 
struck  me,  wellnigh  of  the  rudest;  yet  I 
remember  rejoicing  in  it  all — as  one  indeed 
might  perfectly  rejoice  in  the  juiciness  of 
joints  and  the  abundance  of  accessory  pud 
ding;  for  I  said  to  myself  under  every  shock 
and  at  the  hint  of  every  savour  that  this 
was  what  it  was  for  an  exhibition  to  reek 
with  local  colour,  and  one  could  dispense  with 
a  napkin,  with  a  crusty  roll,  with  room  for 
one's  elbows  or  one's  feet,  with  an  immunity 


46  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

from  intermittence  of  the  "plain  boiled," 
much  better  than  one  could  dispense  with 
that.  There  were  restaurants  galore  even 
at  that  time  in  New  York  and  in  Boston, 
but  I  had  never  before  had  to  do  with  an 
eating-house  and  had  not  yet  seen  the  little 
old  English  world  of  Dickens,  let  alone  of 
the  ever-haunting  Hogarth,  of  Smollett  and 
of  Boswell,  drenched  with  such  a  flood  of 
light.  As  one  sat  there  one  understood',  one 
drew  out  the  severe  seance  not  to  stay  the 
assault  of  precious  conspiring  truths,  not  to 
break  the  current  of  in-rushing  telltale  sug 
gestion.  Every  face  was  a  documentary 
scrap,  hah*  a  dozen  broken  words  to  piece 
with  half  a  dozen  others,  and  so  on  and  on; 
every  sound  was  strong,  whether  rich  and 
fine  or  only  queer  and  coarse;  everything 
in  this  order  drew  a  positive  sweetness  from 
never  being — whatever  else  it  was — grace- 
lessly  flat.  The  very  rudeness  was  ripe,  the 
very  commonness  was  conscious — that  is 
not  related  to  mere  other  forms  of  the  same, 
but  to  matters  as  different  as  possible,  into 
which  it  shaded  off  and  off  or  up  and  up; 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  47 

the  image  in  fine  was  organic,  rounded  and 
complete,  as  definite  as  a  Dutch  picture  of 
low  life  hung  on  a  museum  wall.  "Low" 
I  say  in  respect  to  the  life;  but  that  was  the 
point  for  me,  that  whereas  the  smartness 
and  newness  beyond  the  sea  supposedly  dis 
avowed  the  low,  they  did  so  but  thinly  and 
vainly,  falling  markedly  short  of  the  high; 
which  the  little  boxed  and  boiled  Albany 
attained  to  some  effect  of,  after  a  fashion  of 
its  own,  just  by  having  its  so  thoroughly 
appreciable  note-value  in  a  scheme  of 
manners.  It  was  imbedded,  so  to  speak,  in 
the  scheme,  and  it  borrowed  lights,  it  bor 
rowed  even  glooms,  from  so  much  neigh 
bouring  distinction.  The  places  across  the 
sea,  as  they  to  my  then  eyes  faintly  after- 
glowed,  had  no  impinging  borders  but  those 
of  the  desert  to  borrow  from.  And  if  it  be 
asked  of  me  whether  all  the  while  I  insist, 
for  demonstration  of  the  complacency  with 
which  I  desire  to  revert,  on  not  regretting 
the  disappearance  of  such  too  long  surviving 
sordidries  as  those  I  have  evoked,  I  can  but 
answer  that  blind  emotion,  in  whichever 


48  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

sense  directed,  has  nothing  to  say  to  the 
question  and  that  the  sense  of  what  we  just 
could  confidently  live  by  at  a  given  far-away 
hour  is  a  simple  stout  fact  of  relief. 

Relief,  again,  I  say,  from  the  too  enormous 
present  accretions  and  alternatives — which 
we  witlessly  thought  so  innumerable  then, 
which  we  artlessly  found  so  much  of  the 
interest  of  in  an  immeasurable  multiplicity 
and  which  I  now  feel  myself  thus  grope  for 
ghostly  touch  of  in  the  name,  neither  more 
nor  less,  of  poetic  justice.  I  wasn't  doubtless 
at  the  time  so  very  sure,  after  all,  of  the  com 
parative  felicity  of  our  state,  that  of  the  rare 
moment  for  the  fond  fancy — I  doubtless  even 
a  bit  greedily  missed  certain  quantities,  not 
to  call  them  certain  qualities,  here  and  there, 
and  the  best  of  my  actual  purpose  is  to  make 
amends  for  that  blasphemy.  There  isn't  a 
thing  I  can  imagine  having  missed  that  I 
don't  quite  ache  to  miss  again;  and  it  re 
mains  at  all  events  an  odd  stroke  that,  having 
of  old  most  felt  the  thrill  of  the  place  in  its 
mighty  muchness,  I  have  lived  to  adore  it 
backward  for  its  sweet  simplicity.  I  find 


THE  MIDDLE   YEARS  49 

myself  in  fact  at  the  present  writing  only 
too  sorry  when  not  able  to  minimise  con 
scientiously  this,  that  or  the  other  of  the 
old  sources  of  impression.  The  thing  is 
indeed  admirably  possible  in  a  general  way, 
though  much  of  the  exhibition  was  none  the 
less  undeniably,  was  absolutely  large:  how 
can  I  for  instance  recall  the  great  cab-rank, 
mainly  formed  of  delightful  hansoms,  that 
stretched  along  Piccadilly  from  the  top  of 
the  Green  Park  unendingly  down,  without 
having  to  take  it  for  unsurpassably  modern 
and  majestic?  How  can  I  think — I  select 
my  examples  at  hazard — of  the  "run"  of 
the  more  successful  of  Mr.  Robertson's  com 
edies  at  the  "dear  little  old"  Prince  of 
Wales's  Theatre  in  Tottenham  Court  Road 
as  anything  less  than  one  of  the  wonders 
of  our  age?  How,  by  the  same  token,  can 
I  not  lose  myself  still  more  in  the  glory 
of  a  time  that  was  to  watch  the  drawn-out 
procession  of  Henry  Irving's  Shakespearean 
splendours  at  the  transcendent  Lyceum?  or 
how,  in  the  same  general  line,  not  recognise 
that  to  live  through  the  extravagant  youth 


50  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

of  the  aesthetic  era,  whether  as  embodied  in 
the  then  apparently  inexhaustible  vein  of 
the  Gilbert  and  Sullivan  operas  or  as  more 
monotonously  expressed  in  those  "last  words" 
of  the  raifine  that  were  chanted  and  crooned 
in  the  damask-hung  temple  of  the  Grosvenor 
Gallery,  was  to  seem  privileged  to  such  im 
mensities  as  history  would  find  left  to  her  to 
record  but  with  bated  breath  ? 

These  latter  triumphs  of  taste,  however, 
though  lost  in  the  abysm  now,  had  then  a 
good  many  years  to  wait  and  I  alight  for 
illustrative  support  of  my  present  mild  thesis 
on  the  comparative  humility,  say,  of  the 
inward  aspects,  in  a  large  measure,  of  the 
old  National  Gallery,  where  memory  mixes 
for  me  together  so  many  elements  of  the 
sense  of  an  antique  world.  The  great  ele 
ment  was  of  course  that  I  well-nigh  incredibly 
stood  again  in  the  immediate  presence  of 
Titian  and  Rembrandt,  of  Rubens  and  Paul 
Veronese,  and  that  the  cup  of  sensation  was 
thereby  filled  to  overflowing;  but  I  look  at 
it  to-day  as  concomitantly  warm  and  closed- 
in  and,  as  who  should  say,  cosy  that  the 


THE   MIDDLE  YEARS  51 

ancient  order  and  contracted  state  and  thick- 
coloured  dimness,  all  unconscious  of  rear 
rangements  and  reversals,  blighting  new  lights 
and  invidious  shattering  comparisons,  still 
prevailed  and  kept  contemplation  comfort 
ably  confused  and  serenely  superstitious, 
when  not  indeed  at  its  sharpest  moments 
quite  fevered  with  incoherences.  The  place 
looks  to  me  across  the  half  century  richly 
dim,  yet  at  the  same  time  both  perversely 
plain  and  heavily  violent — violent  through 
indifference  to  the  separations  and  selections 
that  have  become  a  tribute  to  modern  nerves ; 
but  I  cherish  exactly  those  facts  of  benighted- 
ness,  seeming  as  they  do  to  have  positively 
and  blessedly  conditioned  the  particular 
sweetness  of  wonder  with  which  I  haunted 
the  Family  of  Darius,  the  Bacchus  and 
Ariadne,  or  the  so-called  portrait  of  Ariosto. 
Could  one  in  those  days  feel  anything  with 
force,  whether  for  pleasure  or  for  pain,  with 
out  feeling  it  as  an  immense  little  act  or  event 
of  life,  and  as  therefore  taking  place  on  a 
scene  and  in  circumstances  scarce  at  all  to 
be  separated  from  its  own  sense  and  impact? 


52  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

— so  that  to  recover  it  is  to  recover  the  whole 
medium,  the  material  pressure  of  things,  and 
find  it  most  marked  for  preservation  as  an 
aspect,  even,  distinguishably,  a  "composi 
tion." 

What  a  composition,  for  instance  again  I 
am  capable  at  this  hour  of  exclaiming,  the 
conditions  of  felicity  in  which  I  became  aware, 
one  afternoon  during  a  renewed  gape  before 
the  Bacchus  and  Ariadne,  first  that  a  little 
gentleman  beside  me  and  talking  with  the 
greatest  vivacity  to  another  gentleman  was 
extremely  remarkable,  second  that  he  had 
the  largest  and  most  chevelu  auburn  head  I 
had  ever  seen  perched  on  a  scarce  perceptible 
body,  third  that  I  held  some  scrap  of  a  clue 
to  his  identity,  which  couldn't  fail  to  be 
eminent,  fourth  that  this  tag  of  association 
was  with  nothing  less  than  a  small"  photo 
graph  sent  me  westward  across  the  sea  a 
few  months  before,  and  fifth  that  the  sitter 
for  the  photograph  had  been  the  author  of 
Atalanta  in  Calydon  and  Poems  and  Ballads ! 
I  thrilled,  it  perfectly  comes  back  to  me, 
with  the  prodigy  of  this  circumstance  that 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  53 

I  should  be  admiring  Titian  in  the  same 
breath  with  Mr.  Swinburne — that  is  in  the 
same  breath  in  which  he  admired  Titian  and 
in  which  I  also  admired  him,  the  whole  con 
stituting  on  the  spot  between  us,  for  appre 
ciation,  that  is  for  mine,  a  fact  of  intercourse, 
such  a  fact  as  could  stamp  and  colour  the 
whole  passage  ineffaceably,  and  this  even 
though  the  more  illustrious  party  to  it  had 
within  the  minute  turned  off  and  left  me 
shaken.  I  was  shaken,  but  I  was  satisfied — 
that  was  the  point;  I  didn't  ask  more  to 
interweave  another  touch  in  my  pattern, 
and  as  I  once  more  gather  in  the  impression 
I  am  struck  with  my  having  deserved  truly 
as  many  of  the  like  as  possible.  I  was  wel 
come  to  them,  it  may  well  be  said,  on  such 
easy  terms — and  yet  I  ask  myself  whether, 
after  all,  it  didn't  take  on  my  own  part  some 
doing,  as  we  nowadays  say,  to  make  them  so 
well  worth  having.  They  themselves  took, 
I  even  at  the  time  felt,  little  enough  trouble 
for  it,  and  the  virtue  of  the  business  was 
repeatedly,  no  doubt,  a  good  deal  more  in 
what  I  brought  than  in  what  I  took. 


54  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

I  apply  this  remark  indeed  to  those  ex 
tractions  of  the  quintessence  that  had  for 
their  occasion  either  one's  more  undirected 
though  never  fruitless  walks  and  wander 
ings  or  one's  earnest,  one's  positively  pious 
approach  to  whatever  consecrated  ground 
or  shrine  of  pilgrimage  that  might  be  at  the 
moment  in  order.  There  was  not  a  regular 
prescribed  "sight"  that  I  during  those  weeks 
neglected — I  remember  haunting  the  mu 
seums  in  especial,  though  the  South  Ken 
sington  was  then  scarce  more  than  embryonic, 
with  a  sense  of  duty  and  of  excitement  that 
I  was  never  again  to  know  combined  in  equal 
measure,  I  think,  and  that  it  might  really 
have  taken  some  element  of  personal  danger 
to  account  for.  There  was  the  element,  in 
a  manner,  to  season  the  cup  with  sharpness 
— the  danger,  all  the  while,  that  my  freedom 
might  be  brief  and  my  experience  broken, 
that  I  was  under  the  menace  of  uncertainty 
and  subject  in  fine  to  interruption.  The 
fact  of  having  been  so  long  gravely  unwell 
sufficed  by  itself  to  keep  apprehension  alive; 
it  was  our  idea,  or  at  least  quite  intensely 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  55 

mine,  that  what  I  was  doing,  could  I  but 
put  it  through,  would  be  intimately  good 
for  me — only  the  putting  it  through  was 
the  difficulty,  and  I  sometimes  faltered  by 
the  way.  This  makes  now  for  a  general  air 
on  the  part  of  all  the  objects  of  vision  that 
I  recover,  and  almost  as  much  in  those  of 
accidental  encounter  as  in  the  breathlessly 
invoked,  of  being  looked  at  for  the  last  time 
and  giving  out  their  message  and  story  as 
with  the  still,  collected  passion  of  an  only 
chance.  This  feeling  about  them,  not  to 
say,  as  I  might  have  imputed  it,  in  them, 
wonderfully  helped,  as  may  be  believed,  the 
extraction  of  quintessences — which  sprang 
at  me  of  themselves,  for  that  matter,  out  of 
any  appearance  that  confessed  to  the  least 
value  in  the  compound,  the  least  office  in 
the  harmony.  If  the  commonest  street- vista 
was  a  fairly  heart-shaking  contributive  image, 
if  the  incidents  of  the  thick  renascent  light 
anywhere,  and  the  perpetual  excitement  of 
never  knowing,  between  it  and  the  historic 
and  determined  gloom,  which  was  which 
and  which  one  would  most  "back"  for  the 


56  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

general  outcome  and  picture,  so  the  great 
sought-out  compositions,  the  Hampton  Courts 
and  the  Windsors,  the  Richmonds,  the  Dul- 
wiches,  even  the  very  Hampstead  Heaths 
and  Putney  Commons,  to  say  nothing  of 
the  Towers,  the  Temples,  the  Cathedrals 
and  the  strange  penetrabilities  of  the  City, 
ranged  themselves  like  the  rows  of  great 
figures  in  a  sum,  an  amount  immeasurably 
huge,  that  one  would  draw  on  if  not  quite 
as  long  as  one  lived,  yet  as  soon  as  ever  one 
should  seriously  get  to  work.  That,  to  a 
tune  of  the  most  beautiful  melancholy — at 
least  as  I  catch  it  again  now — was  the  way 
all  values  came  out:  they  were  charged 
somehow  with  a  useability  the  most  imme 
diate,  the  most  urgent,  and  which,  I  seemed 
to  see,  would  keep  me  restless  till  I  should 
have  done  something  of  my  very  own  with 
them. 

This  was  indeed  perhaps  what  most  painted 
them  over  with  the  admonitory  appeal:  there 
were  truly  moments  at  which  they  seemed 
not  to  answer  for  it  that  I  should  get  all  the 
good  of  them,  and  the  finest — what  I  was 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  57 

so  extravagantly,  so  fantastically  after— 
unless  I  could  somehow  at  once  indite  my 
sonnet  and  prove  my  title.  The  difficulty 
was  all  in  there  being  so  much  of  them — I 
might  myself  have  been  less  restless  if  they 
could  only  have  been  less  vivid.  This  they 
absolutely  declined  at  any  moment  and  in 
any  connection  to  be,  and  it  was  ever  so  long 
till  they  abated  a  jot  of  the  refusal.  There 
by,  in  consequence,  as  may  easily  be  judged, 
they  were  to  keep  me  in  alarms  to  which  my 
measures  practically  taken,  my  catastrophes 
anxiously  averted,  remained  not  quite  pro 
portionate.  I  recall  a  most  interesting  young 
man  who  had  been  my  shipmate  on  the 
homeward-bound  "China,"  shortly  before — 
I  could  go  at  length  into  my  reasons  for 
having  been  so  struck  with  him,  but  I  for 
bear — who,  on  our  talking,  to  my  intense 
trepidation  of  curiosity,  of  where  I  might 
advisedly  "go"  in  London,  let  me  know  that 
he  always  went  to  Craven  Street  Strand, 
where  bachelor  lodgings  were  highly  con 
venient,  and  whence  I  in  fact  then  saw  them 
flush  at  me  over  the  cold  grey  sea  with  an 


58  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

authenticity  almost  fierce.  I  didn't  in  the 
event,  as  has  been  seen,  go  to  Craven  Street 
for  rooms,  but  I  did  go,  on  the  very  first  oc 
casion,  for  atmosphere,  neither  more  nor 
less — the  young  man  of  the  ship,  building 
so  much  better  than  he  knew,  had  guaranteed 
me  such  a  Tightness  of  that;  and  it  belongs 
to  this  reminiscence,  for  the  triviality  of 
which  I  should  apologize  did  I  find  myself 
at  my  present  pitch  capable  of  apologizing 
for  anything,  that  I  had  on  the  very  spot 
there  one  of  those  hallucinations  as  to  the 
precious  effect  dreadful  to  lose  and  yet  im 
possible  to  render  which  interfused  the  aes 
thetic  dream  in  presence  of  its  subject  with 
the  mortal  drop  of  despair  (as  I  should  insist 
at  least  didn't  the  despair  itself  seem  to  have 
acted  here  as  the  preservative).  The  precious 
effect  in  the  case  of  Craven  Street  was  that 
it  absolutely  reeked,  to  my  fond  fancy,  with 
associations  born  of  the  particular  ancient 
piety  embodied  in  one's  private  altar  to 
Dickens;  and  that  this  upstart  little  truth 
alone  would  revel  in  explanations  that  I 
should  for  the  time  have  feverishly  to  forego. 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  59 

The  exquisite  matter  was  not  the  identifica 
tion  with  the  scene  of  special  shades  or  names; 
it  was  just  that  the  whole  Dickens  procession 
marched  up  and  down,  the  whole  Dickens 
world  looked  out  of  its  queer,  quite  sinister 
windows — for  it  was  the  socially  sinister 
Dickens,  I  am  afraid,  rather  than  the  socially 
encouraging  or  confoundingly  comic  who 
still  at  that  moment  was  most  apt  to  meet 
me  with  his  reasons.  Such  a  reason  was 
just  that  look  of  the  inscrutable  riverward 
street,  packed  to  blackness  with  accumula 
tions  of  suffered  experience,  these,  indescrib 
ably,  disavowed  and  confessed  at  one  and 
the  same  time,  and  with  the  fact  of  its  blocked 
old  Thames-side  termination,  a  mere  fact  of 
more  oppressive  enclosure  now,  telling  all 
sorts  of  vague  loose  stories  about  it. 


WHY,  however,  should  I  pick  up  so  small 
a  crumb  from  that  mere  brief  first 
course  at  a  banquet  of  initiation  which  was  in 
the  event  to  prolong  itself  through  years  and 
years? — unless  indeed  as  a  scrap  of  a  speci 
men,  chosen  at  hazard,  of  the  prompt  activity 
of  a  process  by  which  my  intelligence  after 
wards  came  to  find  itself  more  fed,  I  think, 
than  from  any  other  source  at  all,  or,  for 
that  matter,  from  all  other  sources  put  to 
gether.  A  hundred  more  suchlike  modest 
memories  breathe  upon  me,  each  with  its 
own  dim  little  plea,  as  I  turn  to  face  them, 
but  my  idea  is  to  deal  somehow  more  con 
veniently  with  the  whole  gathered  mass  of 
my  subsequent  impressions  in  this  order,  a 
fruitage  that  I  feel  to  have  been  only  too 
abundantly  stored.  Half  a  dozen  of  those 
of  a  larger  and  more  immediate  dignity, 
incidents  more  particularly  of  the  rather 
invidiously  so-called  social  contact,  pull  my 

60 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  61 

sleeve  as  I  pass;  but  the  long,  backward- 
drawn  train  of  the  later  life  drags  them  along 
with  it,  lost  and  smothered  in  its  spread- 
only  one  of  them  stands  out  or  remains  over, 
insisting  on  its  place  and  hour,  its  felt  dis- 
tinguishability.  To  this  day  I  feel  again 
that  roused  emotion,  my  unsurpassably  prized 
admission  to  the  presence  of  the  great  George 
Eliot,  whom  I  was  taken  to  see,  by  one  of 
the  kind  door-opening  Norton  ladies,  by 
whom  Mrs.  Lewes 's  guarded  portal  at  North 
Bank  appeared  especially  penetrable,  on  a 
Sunday  afternoon  of  April  '69.  Later  occa 
sions,  after  a  considerable  lapse,  were  not  to 
overlay  the  absolute  face-value,  as  I  may  call 
it,  of  all  the  appearances  then  and  there  pre 
sented  me — which  were  taken  home  by  a 
young  spirit  almost  abjectly  grateful,  at  any 
rate  all  devoutly  prepared,  for  them.  I  find 
it  idle  even  to  wonder  what  "place"  the 
author  of  Silas  Marner  and  Middlemarch 
may  be  conceived  to  have  in  the  pride  of 
our  literature — so  settled  and  consecrated  in 
the  individual  range  of  view  is  many  such 
a  case  free  at  last  to  find  itself,  free  after  ups 


62  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

and  downs,  after  fluctuations  of  fame  or 
whatever,  which  have  divested  judgment  of 
any  relevance  that  isn't  most  of  all  the  rele 
vance  of  a  living  and  recorded  relation.  It 
has  ceased  then  to  know  itself  in  any  degree 
as  an  estimate,  has  shaken  off  the  anxieties 
of  circumspection  and  comparison  and  just 
grown  happy  to  act  as  an  attachment  pure 
and  simple,  an  effect  of  life's  own  logic,  but 
in  the  ashes  of  which  the  wonted  fires  of  youth 
need  but  to  be  blown  upon  for  betrayal  of 
a  glow.  Reflective  appreciation  may  have 
originally  been  concerned,  whether  at  its 
most  or  at  its  least,  but  it  is  well  over,  to 
our  infinite  relief — yes,  to  our  immortal  com 
fort,  I  think;  the  interval  back  cannot  again 
be  bridged.  We  simply  sit  with  our  enjoyed 
gain,  our  residual  rounded  possession  in  our 
lap;  a  safe  old  treasure,  which  has  ceased 
to  shrink,  if  indeed  also  perhaps  greatly  to 
swell,  and  all  that  further  touches  it  is  the 
fine  vibration  set  up  if  the  name  we  know 
it  all  by  is  called  into  question — perhaps 
however  little. 

It  was  by  George  Eliot's  name  that  I  was 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  63 

to  go  on  knowing,  was  never  to  cease  to  know, 
a  great  treasure  of  beauty  and  humanity,  of 
applied  and  achieved  art,  a  testimony,  his 
toric  as  well  as  aesthetic,  to  the  deeper  in 
terest  of  the  intricate  English  aspects;  and 
I  now  allow  the  vibration,  as  I  have  called 
it,  all  its  play — quite  as  if  I  had  been  wronged 
even  by  my  own  hesitation  as  to  whether  to 
pick  up  my  anecdote.  That  scruple  wholly 
fades  with  the  sense  of  how  I  must  at  the 
very  time  have  foreseen  that  here  was  one 
of  those  associations  that  would  determine 
in  the  far  future  an  exquisite  inability  to 
revise  it.  Middlemarch  had  not  then  ap 
peared — we  of  the  faith  were  still  to  enjoy 
that  saturation,  and  Felix  Holt  the  radical 
was  upwards  of  three  years  old;  the  impetus 
proceeding  from  this  work,  however,  was 
still  fresh  enough  in  my  pulses  to  have 
quickened  the  palpitation  of  my  finding  my 
self  in  presence.  I  had  rejoiced  without  re 
serve  in  Felix  Holt — the  illusion  of  reading 
which,  outstretched  on  my  then  too  fre 
quently  inevitable  bed  at  Swampscott  during 
a  couple  of  very  hot  days  of  the  summer  of 


64  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

1866,  comes  back  to  me,  followed  by  that 
in  sooth  of  sitting  up  again,  at  no  great  ease, 
to  indite  with  all  promptness  a  review  of  the 
delightful  thing,  the  place  of  appearance  of 
which  nothing  could  now  induce  me  to  name, 
shameless  about  the  general  fact  as  I  may 
have  been  at  the  hour  itself:  over  such  a 
feast  of  fine  rich  natural  tone  did  I  feel  myself 
earnestly  bend.  Quite  unforgettable  to  me 
the  art  and  truth  with  which  the  note  of  this 
tone  was  struck  in  the  beautiful  prologue  and 
the  bygone  appearances,  a  hundred  of  the 
outward  and  visible  signs  of  the  author's  own 
young  rural  and  midmost  England,  made  to 
hold  us  by  their  harmony.  The  book  was 
not,  if  I  rightly  remember,  altogether  genially 
greeted,  but  I  was  to  hold  fast  to  the  charm 
I  had  thankfully  suffered  it,  I  had  been  con 
scious  of  absolutely  needing  it,  to  work. 

Exquisite  the  remembrance  of  how  it  would 
n't  have  "done"  for  me  at  all,  in  relation 
to  other  inward  matters,  not  to  strain  from  the 
case  the  last  drop  of  its  happiest  sense.  And 
I  had  even  with  the  cooling  of  the  first  glow 
so  little  gone  back  upon  it,  as  we  have  nowa- 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  65 

days  learned  to  say,  had  in  fact  so  gone  for 
ward,  floated  by  its  wave  of  superlative 
intended  benignity,  that,  once  in  the  cool 
quiet  drawing-room  at  North  Bank  I  knew 
myself  steeped  in  still  deeper  depths  of  the 
medium.  G.  H.  Lewes  was  absent  for  the 
time  on  an  urgent  errand;  one  of  his  sons, 
on  a  visit  at  the  house,  had  been  suddenly 
taken  with  a  violent  attack  of  pain,  the  heri 
tage  of  a  bad  accident  not  long  before  in  the 
West  Indies,  a  suffered  onset  from  an  angry 
bull,  I  seem  to  recall,  who  had  tossed  or  oth 
erwise  mauled  him,  and,  though  beaten  off,  left 
him  considerably  compromised — these  facts 
being  promptly  imparted  to  us,  in  no  small 
flutter,  by  our  distinguished  lady,  who  came 
in  to  us  from  another  room,  where  she  had 
been  with  the  hapless  young  man  while  his 
father  appealed  to  the  nearest  good  chemist 
for  some  known  specific.  It  infinitely  moved 
me  to  see  so  great  a  celebrity  quite  humanly 
and  familiarly  agitated — even  with  some 
thing  clear  and  noble  in  it  too,  to  which,  as 
well  as  to  the  extraordinarily  interesting 
dignity  of  her  whole  odd  personal  conforma- 


66  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

tion,  I  remember  thinking  her  black  silk 
dress  and  the  lace  mantilla  attached  to  her 
head  and  keeping  company  on  either  side 
with  the  low-falling  thickness  of  her  dark 
hair  effectively  contributed.  I  have  found 
myself,  my  life  long,  attaching  value  to  every 
noted  thing  in  respect  to  a  great  person — and 
George  Eliot  struck  me  on  the  spot  as  some 
how  illustratively  great;  never  at  any  rate 
has  the  impression  of  those  troubled  mo 
ments  faded  from  me,  nor  that  at  once  of  a 
certain  high  grace  in  her  anxiety  and  a  frank 
immediate  appreciation  of  our  presence, 
modest  embarrassed  folk  as  we  were.  It 
took  me  no  long  time  to  thrill  with  the  sense, 
sublime  in  its  unexpectedness,  that  we  were 
perhaps,  or  indeed  quite  clearly,  helping  her 
to  pass  the  time  till  Mr.  Lewes's  return — after 
which  he  would  again  post  off  for  Mr.  Paget 
the  pre-eminent  surgeon;  and  I  see  involved 
with  this  the  perfect  amenity  of  her  assist 
ing  us,  as  it  were,  to  assist  her,  through  un 
relinquished  proper  talk,  due  responsible  re 
mark  and  report,  in  the  last  degree  suggestive 
to  me,  on  a  short  holiday  taken  with  Mr. 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  67 

Lewes  in  the  south  of  France,  whence  they 
had  just  returned.  Yes  indeed,  the  lightest 
words  of  great  persons  are  so  little  as  any 
words  of  others  are  that  I  catch  myself  again 
inordinately  struck  with  her  dropping  it  off 
hand  that  the  mistral,  scourge  of  their  ex 
cursion,  had  blown  them  into  Avignon,  where 
they  had  gone,  I  think,  to  see  J.  S.  Mill,  only 
to  blow  them  straight  out  again — the  figure 
put  it  so  before  us;  as  well  as  with  the  moral 
interest,  the  absence  of  the  banal,  in  their 
having,  on  the  whole  scene,  found  pleasure 
further  poisoned  by  the  frequency  in  all  those 
parts  of  "evil  faces:  oh  the  evil  faces!" 
That  recorded  source  of  suffering  enormously 
affected  me — I  felt  it  as  beautifully  charac 
teristic:  I  had  never  heard  an  impression  de 
voyage  so  little  tainted  with  the  superficial 
or  the  vulgar.  I  was  myself  at  the  time  in 
the  thick  of  impressions,  and  it  was  true  that 
they  would  have  seemed  to  me  rather  to  fail 
of  life,  of  their  own  doubtless  inferior  kind, 
if  submitting  beyond  a  certain  point  to  be 
touched  with  that  sad  or,  as  who  should  say, 
that  grey  colour:  Mrs.  Lewes's  were,  it  ap- 


68  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

peared,  predominantly  so  touched,  and  I 
could  at  once  admire  it  in  them  and  wonder 
if  they  didn't  pay  for  this  by  some  lack  of 
intensity  on  other  sides.  Why  I  didn't  more 
impute  to  her,  or  to  them,  that  possible  lack 
is  more  than  I  can  say,  since  under  the  law 
of  moral  earnestness  the  vulgar  and  the  trivial 
would  be  then  involved  in  the  poor  observa 
tions  of  my  own  making — a  conclusion  suf 
ficiently  depressing. 

However,  I  didn't  find  myself  depressed, 
and  I  didn't  find  the  great  mind  that  was  so 
good  as  to  shine  upon  us  at  that  awkward 
moment  however  dimly  anything  but  augu- 
mented;  what  was  its  sensibility  to  the  evil 
faces  but  part  of  the  large  old  tenderness 
which  the  occasion  had  caused  to  overflow 
and  on  which  we  were  presently  floated  back 
into  the  room  she  had  left? — where  we  might 
perhaps  beguile  a  little  the  impatience  of 
the  sufferer  waiting  for  relief.  We  ventured 
in  our  flutter  to  doubt  whether  we  should 
beguile,  we  held  back  with  a  certain  delicacy 
from  this  irruption,  and  if  there  was  a  mo 
mentary  wonderful  and  beautiful  conflict  I 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  69 

remember  how  our  yielding  struck  me  as 
crowned  with  the  finest  grace  it  could  pos 
sibly  have,  that  of  the  prodigious  privilege 
of  humouring,  yes  literally  humouring  so  re 
nowned  a  spirit  at  a  moment  when  we  could 
really  match  our  judgment  with  hers.  For 
the  injured  young  man,  in  the  other  and  the 
larger  room,  simply  lay  stretched  on  his  bac  k 
on  the  floor,  the  posture  apparently  least 
painful  to  him — though  painful  enough  at 
the  best  I  easily  saw  on  kneeling  beside  him, 
after  my  first  dismay,  to  ask  if  I  could  in 
any  way  ease  him.  I  see  his  face  again,  fair 
and  young  and  flushed,  with  its  vague  little 
smile  and  its  moist  brow;  I  recover  the  mo 
ment  or  two  during  which  we  sought  to  make 
natural  conversation  in  his  presence,  and  my 
question  as  to  what  conversation  was  natural; 
and  then  as  his  father's  return  still  failed  my 
having  the  inspiration  that  at  once  terminated 
the  strain  of  the  scene  and  yet  prolonged  the 
sublime  connection.  Mightn't  /  then  hurry 
off  for  Mr.  Paget? — on  whom,  as  fast  as  a 
cab  could  carry  me,  I  would  wait  with  the 
request  that  he  would  come  at  the  first  pos- 


70  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

sible  moment  to  the  rescue.  Mrs.  Lewes's 
and  our  stricken  companion's  instant  ap 
preciation  of  this  offer  lent  me  wings  on  which 
I  again  feel  myself  borne  very  much  as  if 
suddenly  acting  as  a  messenger  of  the  gods — 
surely  I  had  never  come  so  near  to  performing 
in  that  character.  I  shook  off  my  fellow  visitor 
for  swifter  cleaving  of  the  air,  and  I  recall 
still  feeling  that  I  cleft  it  even  in  the  dull 
four-wheeler  of  other  days  which,  on  getting 
out  of  the  house,  I  recognised  as  the  only 
object  animating,  at  a  distance,  the  long 
blank  Sunday  vista  beside  the  walled-out 
Regent's  Park.  I  crawled  to  Hanover  Square 
— or  was  it  Cavendish?  I  let  the  question 
stand — and,  after  learning  at  the  great  man's 
door  that  though  he  was  not  at  home  he 
was  soon  expected  back  and  would  receive 
my  message  without  delay,  cherished  for  the 
rest  of  the  day  the  particular  quality  of  my 
vibration. 

It  was  doubtless  even  excessive  in  propor 
tion  to  its  cause — yet  in  what  else  but  that 
consisted  the  force  and  the  use  of  vibrations  ? 
It  was  by  their  excess  that  one  knew  them 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  71 

for  such,  as  one  for  that  matter  only  knew 
things  in  general  worth  knowing.  I  didn't 
know  what  I  had  expected  as  an  effect  of 
our  offered  homage,  but  I  had  somehow  not, 
at  the  best,  expected  a  relation — and  now 
a  relation  had  been  dramatically  determined. 
It  would  exist  for  me  if  I  should  never  again 
in  all  the  world  ask  a  feather's  weight  of  it; 
for  myself,  that  is,  it  would  simply  never  be 
able  not  somehow  to  act.  Its  virtue  was 
not  in  truth  at  all  flagrantly  to  be  put  to  the 
proof — any  opportunity  for  that  underwent 
at  the  best  a  considerable  lapse;  but  why 
wasn't  it  intensely  acting,  none  the  less, 
during  the  time  when,  before  being  in  London 
again  for  any  length  of  stay,  I  found  it  inti 
mately  concerned  in  my  perusal  of  Middle- 
march,  so  soon  then  to  appear,  and  even  in 
that  of  Deronda,  its  intervention  on  behalf 
of  which  defied  any  chill  of  time?  And  to 
these  references  I  can  but  subjoin  that  they 
obviously  most  illustrate  the  operation  of  a 
sense  for  drama.  The  process  of  appropria 
tion  of  the  two  fictions  was  experience,  in 
great  intensity,  and  roundabout  the  field 


72  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

was  drawn  the  distinguishable  ring  of  some 
thing  that  belonged  equally  to  this  condition 
and  that  embraced  and  further  vivified  the 
imaged  mass,  playing  in  upon  it  lights  of 
surpassing  fineness.  So  it  was,  at  any  rate, 
that  my  "relation" — for  I  didn't  go  so  far 
as  to  call  it  "ours" — helped  me  to  squeeze 
further  values  from  the  intrinsic  substance 
of  the  copious  final  productions  I  have  named, 
a  weight  of  variety,  dignity  and  beauty  of 
which  I  have  never  allowed  my  measure  to 
shrink. 

Even  this  example  of  a  rage  for  connec 
tions,  I  may  also  remark,  doesn't  deter  me 
from  the  mention  here,  somewhat  out  of  its 
order  of  time,  of  another  of  those  in  which 
my  whole  privilege  of  reference  to  Mrs.  Lewes, 
such  as  it  remained,  was  to  look  to  be  pre 
served.  I  stretch  over  the  years  a  little  to 
overtake  it,  and  it  calls  up  at  once  another 
person,  the  ornament,  or  at  least  the  diver 
sion,  of  a  society  long  since  extinct  to  me, 
but  who,  in  common  with  every  bearer  of 
a  name  I  yield  to  the  temptation  of  writing, 
insists  on  profiting  promptly  by  the  fact  of 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  73 

inscription — very  much  as  if  first  tricking  me 
into  it  and  then  proving  it  upon  me.  The 
extinct  societies  that  once  were  so  sure  of 
themselves,  how  can  they  not  stir  again  if 
the  right  touch,  that  of  a  hand  they  actually 
knew,  however  little  they  may  have  happened 
to  heed  it,  reaches  tenderly  back  to  them? 
The  touch  is  the  retrieval,  so  far  as  it  goes, 
setting  up  as  it  does  heaven  knows  what 
undefeated  continuity.  I  must  have  been 
present  among  the  faithful  at  North  Bank 
during  a  Sunday  afternoon  or  two  of  the 
winter  of  '77  and  '78 — I  was  to  see  the  great 
lady  alone  but  on  a  single  occasion  before 
her  death;  but  those  attestations  are  all  but 
lost  to  me  now  in  the  livelier  pitch  of  a  scene, 
as  I  can  only  call  it,  of  which  I  feel  myself 
again,  all  amusedly,  rather  as  sacrificed  wit 
ness.  I  had  driven  over  with  Mrs.  Greville 
from  Milford  Cottage,  in  Surrey,  to  the  villa 
George  Eliot  and  George  Lewes  had  not  long 
before  built  themselves,  and  which  they  much 
inhabited,  at  Witley — this  indeed,  I  well  re 
member,  in  no  great  flush  of  assurance  that 
my  own  measure  of  our  intended  felicity 


74  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

would  be  quite  that  of  my  buoyant  hostess. 
But  here  exactly  comes,  with  my  memory 
of  Mrs.  Greville,  from  which  numberless  by- 
memories  dangle,  the  interesting  question  that 
makes  for  my  recall  why  things  happened, 
under  her  much-waved  wing,  not  in  any  too 
coherent  fashion — and  this  even  though  it 
was  never  once  given  her,  I  surmise,  to  guess 
that  they  anywhere  fell  short.  So  gently 
used,  all  round  indeed,  was  this  large,  ele 
gant,  extremely  near-sighted  and  extremely 
demonstrative  lady,  whose  genius  was  all  for 
friendship,  admiration,  declamation  and  ex 
penditure,  that  one  doubted  whether  in  the 
whole  course  of  her  career  she  had  ever  once 
been  brought  up,  as  it  were,  against  a  recog 
nised  reality;  other  at  least  perhaps  than 
the  tiresome  cost  of  the  materially  agreeable 
in  life  and  the  perverse  appearance,  at  times, 
that  though  she  "said"  things,  otherwise 
recited  choice  morceaux,  whether  French  or 
English,  with  a  marked  oddity  of  manner, 
of  "attack,"  a  general  incongruity  of  draw 
ing-room  art,  the  various  contributive  ele 
ments,  hour,  scene,  persuaded  patience  and 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  75 

hushed  attention,  were  perforce  a  precarious 
quantity. 

It  is  in  that  bygone  old  grace  of  the  un- 
exploded  factitious,  the  air  of  a  thousand 
dimmed  illusions  and  more  or  less  early  Vic 
torian  beatitudes  on  the  part  of  the  blandly 
idle  and  the  supposedly  accomplished,  that 
Mrs.  Greville,  with  her  exquisite  goodnature 
and  her  innocent  fatuity,  is  embalmed  for 
me;  so  that  she  becomes  in  that  light  a  truly 
shining  specimen,  almost  the  image  or  com 
pendium  of  a  whole  side  of  a  social  order. 
Just  so  she  has  happy  suggestion;  just  so, 
whether  or  no  by  a  twist  of  my  mind  toward 
the  enviability  of  certain  complacencies  of 
faith  and  taste  that  we  would  yet  neither  live 
back  into  if  we  could,  nor  can  catch  again  if 
we  would,  I  see  my  forgotten  friend  of  that 
moist  autumn  afternoon  of  our  call,  and  of 
another,  on  the  morrow,  which  I  shall  not 
pass  over,  as  having  rustled  and  gushed  and 
protested  and  performed  through  her  term 
under  a  kind  of  protection  by  the  easy-going 
gods  that  is  not  of  this  fierce  age.  Amiabili 
ties  and  absurdities,  harmless  serenities  and 


76  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

vanities,  pretensions  and  undertakings  un 
ashamed,  still  profited  by  the  mildness  of 
the  critical  air  and  the  benignity  of  the  social 
— on  the  right  side  at  least  of  the  social  line. 
It  had  struck  me  from  the  first  that  nowhere 
so  much  as  in  England  was  it  fortunate  to 
be  fortunate,  and  that  against  that  condition, 
once  it  had  somehow  been  handed  down  and 
determined,  a  number  of  the  sharp  truths 
that  one  might  privately  apprehend  beat 
themselves  beautifully  in  vain.  I  say  beau 
tifully  for  I  confess  without  scruple  to  have 
found  again  and  again  at  that  time  an  at 
taching  charm  in  the  general  exhibition  of 
enjoyed  immunity,  paid  for  as  it  was  almost 
always  by  the  personal  amenity,  the  practice 
of  all  sorts  of  pleasantness;  if  it  kept  the 
gods  themselves  for  the  time  in  goodhumour, 
one  was  willing  enough,  or  at  least  I  was,  to 
be  on  the  side  of  the  gods.  Unmistakable 
too,  as  I  seem  to  recover  it,  was  the  posi 
tive  interest  of  watching  and  noting,  round 
about  one,  for  the  turn,  or  rather  for  the  blest 
continuity,  of  their  benevolence:  such  an 
appeal  proceeded,  in  this,  that  and  the  other 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  77 

particular  case,  from  the  fool's  paradise  really 
rounded  and  preserved,  before  one's  eyes, 
for  those  who  were  so  good  as  to  animate 
it.  There  was  always  the  question  of  how 
long  they  would  be  left  to,  and  the  growth 
of  one's  fine  suspense,  not  to  say  one's  frank 
little  gratitude,  as  the  miracle  repeated  it 
self. 

All  of  which,  I  admit,  dresses  in  many  re 
flections  the  small  circumstance  that  Milford 
Cottage,  with  its  innumerable  red  candles 
and  candle-shades,  had  affected  me  as  the 
most  embowered  retreat  for  social  innocence 
that  it  was  possible  to  conceive,  and  as  ab 
solutely  settling  the  question  of  whether  the 
practice  of  pleasantness  mightn't  quite  ideally 
pay  for  the  fantastic  protectedness.  The  red 
candles  in  the  red  shades  have  remained  with 
me,  inexplicably,  as  a  vivid  note  of  this  pitch, 
shedding  their  rosy  light,  with  the  autumn 
gale,  the  averted  reality,  all  shut  out,  upon 
such  felicities  of  feminine  helplessness  as  I 
couldn't  have  prefigured  in  advance  and  as 
exemplified,  for  further  gathering  in,  the  pos 
sibilities  of  the  old  tone.  Nowhere  had  the 


78  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

evening  curtains  seemed  so  drawn,  nowhere 
the  copious  service  so  soft,  nowhere  the 
second  volume  of  the  new  novel,  "half- 
uncut,"  so  close  to  one's  hand,  nowhere  the 
exquisite  head  and  incomparable  brush  of 
the  domesticated  collie  such  an  attestation 
of  that  standard  at  least,  nowhere  the  har 
monies  of  accident — of  intention  was  more 
than  one  could  say — so  incapable  of  a  wrong 
deflection.  That  society  would  lack  the 
highest  finish  without  some  such  distributed 
clusters  of  the  thoroughly  gentle,  the  mildly 
presumptuous  and  the  inveterately  mistaken, 
was  brought  home  to  me  there,  in  fine,  to  a 
tune  with  which  I  had  no  quarrel,  perverse 
enough  as  I  had  been  from  an  early  time  to 
know  but  the  impulse  to  egg  on  society  to 
the  fullest  discharge  of  any  material  stirring 
within  its  breast  and  not  making  for  cruelty 
or  brutality,  mere  baseness  or  mere  stupidity, 
that  would  fall  into  a  picture  or  a  scene.  The 
quality  of  serene  anxiety  on  the  part  for  in 
stance  of  exquisite  Mrs.  Thellusson,  Mrs. 
Greville's  mother,  was  by  itself  a  plea  for  any 
privilege  one  should  fancy  her  perched  upon; 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  79 

and  I  scarce  know  if  this  be  more  or  be  less 
true  because  the  anxiety — at  least  as  I  culled 
its  fragrance — was  all  about  the  most  secon 
dary  and  superfluous  small  matters  alone. 
It  struck  me,  I  remember,  as  a  new  and  un 
expected  form  of  the  pathetic  altogether; 
and  there  was  no  form  of  the  pathetic,  any 
more  than  of  the  tragic  or  the  comic,  that 
didn't  serve  as  another  pearl  for  one's  length 
ening  string.  And  I  pass  over  what  was 
doubtless  the  happiest  stroke  in  the  com 
position,  the  fact  of  its  involving,  as  all-dis 
tinguished  husband  of  the  other  daughter, 
an  illustrious  soldier  and  servant  of  his  sover 
eign,  of  his  sovereigns  that  were  successively 
to  be,  than  against  whose  patient  handsome 
bearded  presence  the  whole  complexus  of 
femininities  and  futilities  couldn't  have  been 
left  in  more  tolerated  and  more  contrasted 
relief;  pass  it  over  to  remind  myself  of  how, 
in  my  particular  friend  of  the  three,  the  comic 
and  the  tragic  were  presented  in  a  confusion 
that  made  the  least  intended  of  them  at  any 
moment  take  effectively  the  place  of  the 
most.  The  impression,  that  is,  was  never 


80  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

that  of  the  sentiment  operating — save  in 
deed  perhaps  when  the  dear  lady  applied 
her  faculty  for  frank  imitation  of  the  ridic 
ulous,  which  she  then  quite  directly  and 
remarkably  achieved;  but  that  she  could 
be  comic,  that  she  was  comic,  was  what  least 
appeased  her  unrest,  and  there  were  reasons 
enough,  in  a  word,  why  her  failure  of  the 
grand  manner  or  the  penetrating  note  should 
evoke  the  idea  of  their  opposites  perfectly 
achieved.  She  sat,  alike  in  adoration  and 
emulation,  at  the  feet  of  my  admirable  old 
friend  Fanny  Kemble,  the  goodnature  of 
whose  consent  to  "hear"  her  was  equalled 
only  by  the  immediately  consequent  action 
of  the  splendidly  corrective  spring  on  the 
part  of  that  unsurpassed  subject  of  the  dra 
matic  afflatus  fairly,  or,  as  I  should  perhaps 
above  all  say,  contradictiously  provoked. 
Then  aspirant  and  auditor,  rash  adventurer 
and  shy  alarmist,  were  swept  away  together 
in  the  gust  of  magnificent  Tightness  and 
beauty,  no  scrap  of  the  far-scattered  prime 
proposal  being  left  to  pick  up. 

Which    detail    of   reminiscence   has    again 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  81 

stayed  my  course  to  the  Witley  Villa,  when 
even  on  the  way  I  quaked  a  little  with  my 
sense  of  what  generally  most  awaited  or  over 
took  my  companion's  prime  proposals.  What 
had  come  most  to  characterise  the  Leweses 
to  my  apprehension  was  that  there  couldn't 
be  a  thing  in  the  world  about  which  they 
weren't,  and  on  the  most  conceded  and  as 
sured  grounds,  almost  scientifically  particular; 
which  presumption,  however,  only  added  to 
the  relevance  of  one's  learning  how  such  a 
matter  as  their  relation  with  Mrs.  Greville 
could  in  accordance  with  noble  consistencies 
be  carried  on.  I  could  trust  her  for  it  per 
fectly,  as  she  knew  no  law  but  that  of  inno 
cent  and  exquisite  aberration,  never  wanting 
and  never  less  than  consecrating,  and  I  fear 
I  but  took  refuge  for  the  rest  in  declining 
all  responsibility.  I  remember  trying  to  say 
to  myself  that,  even  such  as  we  were,  our 
visit  couldn't  but  scatter  a  little  the  weight 
of  cloud  on  the  Olympus  we  scaled — given 
the  dreadful  drenching  afternoon  we  were 
after  all  an  imaginable  short  solace  there; 
and  this  indeed  would  have  borne  me  through 


82  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

to  the  end  save  for  an  incident  which,  with 
a  quite  ideal  logic,  left  our  adventure  an  ap 
proved  ruin.  I  see  again  our  bland,  benign, 
commiserating  hostess  beside  the  fire  in  a 
chill  desert  of  a  room  where  the  master  of 
the  house  guarded  the  opposite  hearthstone, 
and  I  catch  once  more  the  impression  of  no 
occurrence  of  anything  at  all  appreciable  but 
their  liking  us  to  have  come,  with  our  terribly 
trivial  contribution,  mainly  from  a  prevision 
of  how  they  should  more  devoutly  like  it 
when  we  departed.  It  is  remarkable,  but 
the  occasion  yields  me  no  single  echo  of  a 
remark  on  the  part  of  any  of  us — nothing 
more  than  the  sense  that  our  great  author 
herself  peculiarly  suffered  from  the  fury  of 
the  elements,  and  that  they  had  about  them 
rather  the  minimum  of  the  paraphernalia  of 
reading  and  writing,  not  to  speak  of  that  of 
tea,  a  conceivable  feature  of  the  hour,  but 
which  was  not  provided  for.  Again  I  felt 
touched  with  privilege,  but  not,  as  in  '69, 
with  a  form  of  it  redeemed  from  barrenness 
by  a  motion  of  my  own,  and  the  taste  of 
barrenness  was  in  fact  in  my  mouth  under  the 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  83 

effect  of  our  taking  leave.  We  did  so  with 
considerable  flourish  till  we  had  passed  out  to 
the  hall  again,  indeed  to  the  door  of  the  wait 
ing  carriage,  toward  which  G.  H.  Lewes  him 
self  all  sociably,  then  above  all  conversingly, 
wafted  us — yet  staying  me  by  a  sudden  re 
membrance  before  I  had  entered  the  brougham 
and  signing  me  to  wait  while  he  repaired  his 
omission.  I  returned  to  the  doorstep,  whence 
I  still  see  him  reissue  from  the  room  we  had 
just  left  and  hurry  toward  me  across  the  hall 
shaking  high  the  pair  of  blue-bound  volumes 
his  allusion  to  the  uninvited,  the  verily  im 
portunate  loan  of  which  by  Mrs.  Greville 
had  lingered  on  the  air  after  his  dash  in  quest 
of  them;  "Ah  those  books — take  them  away, 
please,  away,  away!"  I  hear  him  unre 
servedly  plead  while  he  thrusts  them  again 
at  me,  and  I  scurry  back  into  our  conveyance, 
where,  and  where  only,  settled  afresh  with 
my  companion,  I  venture  to  assure  myself 
of  the  horrid  truth  that  had  squinted  at  me 
as  I  relieved  our  good  friend  of  his  super 
fluity.  What  indeed  was  this  superfluity 
but  the  two  volumes  of  my  own  precious 


84  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

"last" — we  were  still  in  the  blest  age  of 
volumes — presented  by  its  author  to  the 
lady  of  Milford  Cottage,  and  by  her,  mis 
guided  votary,  dropped  with  the  best  con 
science  in  the  world  into  the  Witley  abyss, 
out  of  which  it  had  jumped  with  violence, 
under  the  touch  of  accident,  straight  up  again 
into  my  own  exposed  face? 

The  bruise  inflicted  there  I  remember  feel 
ing  for  the  moment  only  as  sharp,  such  a 
mixture  of  delightful  small  questions  at  once 
salved  it  over  and  such  a  charm  in  particular 
for  me  to  my  recognising  that  this  particular 
wrong — inflicted  all  unawares,  which  exactly 
made  it  sublime — was  the  only  Tightness  of 
our  visit.  Our  hosts  hadn't  so  much  as  con 
nected  book  with  author,  or  author  with 
visitor,  or  visitor  with  anything  but  the 
convenience  of  his  ridding  them  of  an  uncon- 
sidered  trifle;  grudging  as  they  so  justifiedly 
did  the  impingement  of  such  matters  on  their 
consciousness.  The  vivid  demonstration  of 
one's  failure  to  penetrate  there  had  been  in 
the  sweep  of  Lewes's  gesture,  which  could 
scarce  have  been  bettered  by  his  actually 
wielding  a  broom.  I  think  nothing  passed 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  85 

between  us  in  the  brougham  on  revelation  of 
the  identity  of  the  offered  treat  so  emphati 
cally  declined — I  see  that  I  couldn't  have 
laughed  at  it  to  the  confusion  of  my  gentle 
neighbour.  But  I  quite  recall  my  grasp  of 
the  interest  of  our  distinguished  friends'  in 
accessibility  to  the  unattended  plea,  with  the 
light  it  seemed  to  throw  on  what  it  was  really 
to  be  attended.  Never,  never  save  as  at 
tended — by  presumptions,  that  is,  far  other 
than  any  then  hanging  about  one — would 
one  so  much  as  desire  not  to  be  pushed  out 
of  sight.  I  needn't  attempt,  however,  to 
supply  all  the  links  in  the  chain  of  associa 
tion  which  led  to  my  finally  just  qualified 
beatitude:  I  had  been  served  right  enough 
in  all  conscience,  but  the  pity  was  that  Mrs. 
Greville  had  been.  This  I  never  wanted  for 
her;  and  I  may  add,  in  the  connection,  that 
I  discover  now  no  grain  of  false  humility  in 
my  having  enjoyed  in  my  own  person  adorn 
ing  such  a  tale.  There  was  positively  a  fine 
high  thrill  in  thinking  of  persons — or  at  least 
of  a  person,  for  any  fact  about  Lewes  was 
but  derivative — engaged  in  my  own  pursuit 
and  yet  detached,  by  what  I  conceived,  de- 


86  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

tached  by  a  pitch  of  intellectual  life,  from 
all  that  made  it  actual  to  myself.  There 
was  the  lift  of  contemplation,  there  the  in 
spiring  image  and  the  big  supporting  truth; 
the  pitch  of  intellectual  life  in  the  very  fact 
of  which  we  seemed,  my  hostess  and  I,  to 
have  caught  our  celebrities  sitting  in  that 
queer  bleak  way  wouldn't  have  bullied  me  in 
the  least  if  it  hadn't  been  the  centre  of  such  a 
circle  of  gorgeous  creation.  It  was  the  fashion 
among  the  profane  in  short  either  to  mis 
doubt,  before  George  Eliot's  canvas,  the 
latter's  backing  of  rich  thought,  or  else  to 
hold  that  this  matter  of  philosophy,  and  even 
if  but  of  the  philosophic  vocabulary,  thrust 
itself  through  to  the  confounding  of  the  pic 
ture.  But  with  that  thin  criticism  I  wasn't, 
as  I  have  already  intimated,  to  have  a  mo 
ment's  patience;  I  was  to  become,  I  was  to 
remain — I  take  pleasure  in  repeating — even 
a  very  Derondist  of  Derondists,  for  my  own 
wanton  joy:  which  amounts  to  saying  that 
I  found  the  figured,  coloured  tapestry  always 
vivid  enough  to  brave  no  matter  what  com 
plication  of  the  stitch. 


VI 

I  TAKE  courage  to  confess  moreover  that  I 
am  carried  further  still  by  the  current  on 
which  Mrs.  Greville,  friend  of  the  super- 
eminent,  happens  to  have  launched  me;  for 
I  can  neither  forbear  a  glance  at  one  or  two 
of  the  other  adventures  promoted  by  her, 
nor  in  the  least  dissociate  her  from  that  long 
aftertaste  of  them,  such  as  they  were,  which 
I  have  positively  cultivated.  I  ask  myself 
first,  however,  whether  or  no  our  drive  to 
Aldworth,  on  the  noble  height  of  Blackdown, 
had  been  preceded  by  the  couple  of  occasions 
in  London  on  which  I  was  to  feel  I  saw  the 
Laureate  most  at  his  ease,  yet  on  reflection 
concluding  that  the  first  of  these — and  the 
fewest  days  must  have  separated  them — 
formed  my  prime  introduction  to  the  poet  I 
had  earliest  known  and  best  loved.  The 
revelational  evening  I  speak  of  is  peopled, 
to  my  memory,  not  a  little,  yet  with  a  con- 

87 


88  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

fusedness  out  of  which  Tennyson's  own  pres 
ence  doesn't  at  all  distinctly  emerge;  he  was 
occupying  a  house  in  Eaton  Place,  as  appeared 
then  his  wont,  for  the  earlier  weeks  of  the 
spring,  and  I  seem  to  recover  that  I  had 
"gone  on"  to  it,  after  dining  somewhere  else, 
under  protection  of  my  supremely  kind  old 
friend  the  late  Lord  Hough  ton,  to  whom  I 
was  indebted  in  those  years  for  a  most  pro 
miscuous  befriending.  He  must  have  been 
of  the  party,  and  Mrs.  Greville  quite  inde 
pendently  must,  since  I  catch  again  the 
vision  of  her,  so  expansively  and  volumin 
ously  seated  that  she  might  fairly  have 
been  couchant,  so  to  say,  for  the  proposed 
characteristic  act — there  was  a  deliberation 
about  it  that  precluded  the  idea  of  a  spring; 
that,  namely,  of  addressing  something  of  the 
Laureate's  very  own  to  the  Laureate's  very 
face.  Beyond  the  sense  that  he  took  these 
things  with  a  gruff  philosophy — and  could 
always  repay  them,  on  the  spot,  in  heavily- 
shovelled  coin  of  the  same  mint,  since  it  was 
a  question  of  his  genius — I  gather  in  again 
no  determined  impression,  unless  it  may  have 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  89 

been,  as  could  only  be   probable,  the  effect 
of  fond  prefigurements  utterly  blighted. 

The  fond  prefigurements  of  youthful  piety 
are  predestined  more  often  than  not,  I  think, 
experience  interfering,  to  strange  and  violent 
shocks;  from  which  no  general  appeal  is 
conceivable  save  by  the  prompt  preclusion 
either  of  faith  or  of  knowledge,  a  sad  choice 
at  the  best.  No  other  such  illustration  recurs 
to  me  of  the  possible  refusal  of  those  two 
conditions  of  an  acquaintance  to  recognise 
each  other  at  a  given  hour  as  the  silent  crash 
of  which  I  was  to  be  conscious  several  years 
later,  in  Paris,  when  placed  in  presence  of 
M.  Ernest  Renan,  from  the  surpassing  dis 
tinction  of  whose  literary  face,  with  its  ex 
quisite  finish  of  every  feature,  I  had  from  far 
back  extracted  every  sort  of  shining  gage,  a 
presumption  general  and  positive.  Widely 
enough  to  sink  all  interest — that  was  the 
dreadful  thing — opened  there  the  chasm  be 
tween  the  implied,  as  I  had  taken  it,  and  the 
attested,  as  I  had,  at  the  first  blush,  to  take 
it;  so  that  one  was  in  fact  scarce  to  know 
what  might  have  happened  if  interest  hadn't 


90  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

by  good  fortune  already  reached  such  a  com 
pass  as  to  stick  half  way  down  the  descent. 
What  interest  can  survive  becomes  thus, 
surely,  as  much  one  of  the  lessons  of  life  as 
the  number  of  ways  in  which  it  remains  im 
possible.  What  comes  up  in  face  of  the 
shocks,  as  I  have  called  them,  is  the  ques 
tion  of  a  shift  of  every  supposition,  a  change 
of  base  under  fire,  as  it  were;  which  must 
take  place  successfully  if  one's  advance  be 
not  abandoned  altogether.  I  remember  that 
I  saw  the  Tennyson  directly  presented  as 
just  utterly  other  than  the  Tennyson  in 
directly,  and  if  the  readjustment,  for  ac 
quaintance,  was  less  difficult  than  it  was  to 
prove  in  the  case  of  the  realised  Renan  the 
obligation  to  accept  the  difference — wholly  as 
difference  and  without  reference  to  strict 
loss  or  gain — was  like  a  rap  on  the  knuckles 
of  a  sweet  superstition.  Fine,  fine,  fine  could 
he  only  be — fine  in  the  sense  of  that  quality 
in  the  texture  of  his  verse,  which  had  ap 
pealed  all  along  by  its  most  inward  principle 
to  one's  taste,  and  had  by  the  same  stroke 
shown  with  what  a  force  of  lyric  energy  and 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  91 

sincerity  the  kind  of  beauty  so  engaged  for 
could  be  associated.  Was  it  that  I  had  pre 
conceived  him  in  that  light  as  pale  and  pene 
trating,  as  emphasising  in  every  aspect  the 
fact  that  he  was  fastidious?  was  it  that  I 
had  supposed  him  more  fastidious  than  really 
could  have  been — at  the  best  for  that  effect? 
was  it  that  the  grace  of  the  man  couldn't,  by 
my  measure,  but  march  somehow  with  the 
grace  of  the  poet,  given  a  perfection  of  this 
grace  ?  was  it  in  fine  that  style  of  a  particular 
kind,  when  so  highly  developed,  seemed 
logically  to  leave  no  room  for  other  quite 
contradictious  kinds?  These  were  considera 
tions  of  which  I  recall  the  pressure,  at  the 
same  time  that  I  fear  I  have  no  account  of 
them  to  give  after  they  have  fairly  faced  the 
full,  the  monstrous  demonstration  that  Ten 
nyson  was  not  Tennysonian.  The  desperate 
sequel  to  that  was  that  he  thereby  changed 
one's  own  state  too,  one's  beguiled,  one's 
aesthetic;  for  what  could  this  strange  appre 
hension  do  but  reduce  the  Tennysonian 
amount  altogether  ?  It  dried  up,  to  a  certain 
extent,  that  is,  in  my  own  vessel  of  sympathy 


92  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

— leaving  me  so  to  ask  whether  it  was  before 
or  after  that  I  should  take  myself  for  the 
bigger  fool.  There  had  been  folly  somewhere; 
yet  let  me  add  that  once  I  recognised  this, 
once  I  felt  the  old  fond  pitch  drop  of  itself, 
not  alone  inevitably,  but  very  soon  quite 
conveniently  and  while  I  magnanimously 
granted  that  the  error  had  been  mine  and 
nobody's  else  at  all,  an  odd  prosaic  pleasant 
ness  set  itself  straight  up,  substitutionally, 
over  the  whole  ground,  which  it  swept  clear 
of  every  single  premeditated  effect.  It  made 
one's  perceptive  condition  purely  profane, 
reduced  it  somehow  to  having  rather  the 
excess  of  awkwardness  than  the  excess  of 
felicity  to  reckon  with;  yet  still  again,  as  I 
say,  enabled  a  compromise  to  work. 

The  compromise  in  fact  worked  beauti 
fully  under  my  renewal  of  impression — for 
which  a  second  visit  at  Eaton  Place  offered 
occasion;  and  this  even  though  I  had  to  inter 
weave  with  the  scene  as  best  I  might  a  highly 
complicating  influence.  To  speak  of  James 
Russell  Lowell's  influence  as  above  all  com 
plicating  on  any  scene  to  the  interest  of  which 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  93 

he  contributed  may  superficially  seem  a 
perverse  appreciation  of  it;  and  yet  in  the 
light  of  that  truth  only  do  I  recover  the  full 
sense  of  his  value,  his  interest,  the  moving 
moral  of  his  London  adventure — to  find  my 
self  already  bumping  so  straight  against 
which  gives  me,  I  confess,  a  sufficiently  por 
tentous  shake.  He  comes  in,  as  it  were,  by 
a  force  not  to  be  denied,  as  soon  as  I  look 
at  him  again — as  soon  as  I  find  him  for  in 
stance  on  the  doorstep  in  Eaton  Place  at  the 
hour  of  my  too  approaching  it  for  luncheon 
as  he  had  just  done.  There  he  is,  with  the 
whole  question  of  him,  at  once  before  me,  and 
literally  superimposed  by  that  fact  on  any 
minor  essence.  I  quake,  positively,  with  the 
apprehension  of  the  commemorative  dance 
he  may  lead  me;  but  for  the  moment,  just 
here,  I  steady  myself  with  an  effort  and  go 
in  with  him  to  his  having  the  Laureate's 
personal  acquaintance,  by  every  symptom, 
and  rather  to  my  surprise,  all  to  make.  Mrs. 
Tennyson's  luncheon  table  was  an  open  feast, 
with  places  for  possible  when  not  assured 
guests;  and  no  one  but  the  American  Min- 


94  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

ister,  scarce  more  than  just  installed,  and 
his  extremely  attached  compatriot  sat  down 
at  first  with  our  gracious  hostess.  The  board 
considerably  stretched,  and  after  it  had 
been  indicated  to  Lowell  that  he  had  best 
sit  at  the  end  near  the  window,  where  the 
Bard  would  presently  join  him,  I  remained, 
near  our  hostess,  separated  from  him  for 
some  little  time  by  an  unpeopled  waste. 
Hallam  came  in  all  genially  and  auspiciously, 
yet  only  to  brush  us  with  his  blessing  and 
say  he  was  lunching  elsewhere,  and  my  wonder 
meanwhile  hung  about  the  representative  of 
my  country,  who,  though  partaking  of  of 
fered  food,  appeared  doomed  to  disconnec 
tion  from  us.  I  may  say  at  once  that  my 
wonder  was  always  unable  not  to  hang  about 
this  admired  and  cherished  friend  when  other 
persons,  especially  of  the  eminent  order, 
were  concerned  in  the  scene.  The  case  was 
quite  other  for  the  unshared  relation,  or 
when  it  was  shared  by  one  or  other  of  three 
or  four  of  our  common  friends  who  had  the 
gift  of  determining  happily  the  pitch  of 
ease;  suspense,  not  to  say  anxiety,  as  to  the 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  95 

possible  turn  or  drift  of  the  affair  quite 
dropped — I  rested  then,  we  alike  rested,  I 
ever  felt,  in  a  golden  confidence.  This  last 
was  so  definitely  not  the  note  of  my  atten 
tion  to  him,  so  far  as  I  might  indulge  it,  in 
the  wider  social  world,  that  I  shall  not  scruple, 
occasion  offering,  to  inquire  into  the  reasons 
of  the  difference.  For  I  can  only  see  the 
ghosts  of  my  friends,  by  this  token,  as  "my" 
J.  R.  L.  and  whoever;  which  means  that 
my  imagination,  of  the  wanton  life  of  which 
these  remarks  pretend  but  to  form  the  record, 
had  appropriated  them,  under  the  prime 
contact — from  the  moment  the  prime  contact 
had  successfully  worked — once  for  all,  and 
contributed  the  light  in  which  they  were 
constantly  exposed. 

Yes,  delightful  I  shall  undertake  finding 
it,  and  perhaps  even  making  it,  to  read  J. 
R.  L.'s  exposure  back  into  its  light;  which 
I  in  fact  see  begin  to  shine  for  me  more  amply 
during  those  very  minutes  of  our  wait  for 
our  distinguished  host  and  even  the  several 
that  followed  the  latter's  arrival  and  his 
seating  himself  opposite  the  unknown  guest, 


96  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

whose  identity  he  had  failed  to  grasp. 
Nothing,  exactly,  could  have  made  dear 
Lowell  more  "my"  Lowell,  as  I  have  pre 
sumed  to  figure  him,  than  the  stretch  of  un 
certainty  so  supervening  and  which,  in  its 
form  of  silence  at  first  completely  unbroken 
between  the  two  poets,  rapidly  took  on  for 
me  monstrous  proportions.  I  conversed  with 
my  gentle  neighbour  during  what  seemed  an 
eternity — really  but  hearing,  as  the  minutes 
sped,  all  that  Tennyson  didn't  say  to  Lowell 
and  all  that  Lowell  wouldn't  on  any  such 
compulsion  as  that  say  to  Tennyson.  I  like, 
however,  to  hang  again  upon  the  hush — for 
the  sweetness  of  the  relief  of  its  break  by  the 
fine  Tennysonian  growl.  I  had  never 
dreamed,  no,  of  a  growling  Tennyson — I 
had  too  utterly  otherwise  fantasticated;  but 
no  line  of  Locksley  Hall  rolled  out  as  I  was 
to  happen  soon  after  to  hear  it,  could  have 
been  sweeter  than  the  interrogative  sound 
of  "Do  you  know  anything  about  Lowell?" 
launched  on  the  chance  across  the  table  and 
crowned  at  once  by  Mrs.  Tennyson's  anxious 
quaver:  "Why,  my  dear,  this  is  Mr.  Lowell !" 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  97 

The  clearance  took  place  successfully  enough, 
and  the  incident,  I  am  quite  aware,  seems 
to  shrink  with  it;  in  spite  of  which  I  still 
cherish  the  reduced  reminiscence  for  its  con 
nections:  so  far  as  my  vision  of  Lowell  was 
concerned  they  began  at  that  moment  so 
to  multiply.  A  belated  guest  or  two  more 
came  in,  and  I  wish  I  could  for  my  modesty's 
sake  refer  to  this  circumstance  alone  the  fact 
that  nothing  more  of  the  occasion  survives 
for  me  save  the  intense  but  restricted  glow 
of  certain  instants,  in  another  room,  to  which 
we  had  adjourned  for  smoking  and  where 
my  alarmed  sense  of  the  Bard's  restriction 
to  giving  what  he  had  as  a  bard  only  became 
under  a  single  turn  of  his  hand  a  vision  of 
quite  general  munificence.  Incredibly,  in 
conceivably,  he  had  read — and  not  only  read 
but  admired,  and  not  only  admired  but  un- 
derstandingly  referred;  referred,  time  and 
some  accident  aiding,  the  appreciated  object, 
a  short  tale  I  had  lately  put  forth,  to  its  ac 
tually  present  author,  who  could  scarce 
believe  his  ears  on  hearing  the  thing  super 
latively  commended;  pronounced,  that  is, 


98  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

by  the  illustrious  speaker,  more  to  his  taste 
than  no  matter  what  other  like  attempt. 
Nothing  would  induce  me  to  disclose  the 
title  of  the  piece,  which  has  little  to  do  with 
the  matter;  my  point  is  but  in  its  having  on 
the  spot  been  matter  of  pure  romance  to  me 
that  I  was  there  and  positively  so  addressed. 
For  it  was  a  solution,  the  happiest  in  the 
world,  and  from  which  I  at  once  extracted 
enormities  of  pleasure:  my  relation  to  what 
ever  had  bewildered  me  simply  became  per 
fect:  the  author  of  In  Memoriam  had  "liked" 
my  own  twenty  pages,  and  his  doing  so  was 
a  gage  of  his  grace  in  which  I  felt  I  should 
rest  forever — in  which  I  have  in  fact  rested 
to  this  hour.  My  own  basis  of  liking — such 
a  blessed  supersession  of  all  worryings  and 
wonderings  ! — was  accordingly  established, 
and  has  met  every  demand  made  of  it. 

Greatest  was  to  have  been,  I  dare  say, 
the  demand  to  which  I  felt  it  exposed  by  the 
drive  over  to  Aldworth  with  Mrs.  Greville 
which  I  noted  above  and  which  took  place, 
if  I  am  not  mistaken,  on  the  morrow  of  our 
drive  to  Witley.  A  different  shade  of  con- 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  99 

fidence  and  comfort,  I  make  out,  accompanied 
this  experiment:  I  believed  more,  for  reasons 
I  shall  not  now  attempt  to  recover,  in  the 
furthermost  maintenance  of  our  flying  bridge, 
the  final  piers  of  which,  it  was  indubitable, 
had  at  Witley  given  way.  What  could  have 
been  moreover  less  like  G.  H.  Lewes 's  vale 
dictory  hurl  back  upon  us  of  the  printed  ap 
peal  in  which  I  was  primarily  concerned  than 
that  so  recent  and  so  directly  opposed  passage 
of  the  Eaton  Place  smoking-room,  thanks  to 
which  I  could  nurse  a  certified  security  all 
along  the  road?  I  surrendered  to  security, 
I  perhaps  even  grossly  took  my  ease  in  it; 
and  I  was  to  breathe  from  beginning  to  end 
of  our  visit,  which  began  with  our  sitting 
again  at  luncheon,  an  air — so  unlike  that  of 
Witley ! — in  which  it  seemed  to  me  frankly 
that  nothing  but  the  blest  obvious,  or  at  least 
the  blest  outright,  could  so  much  as  attempt 
to  live.  These  elements  hung  sociably  and 
all  auspiciously  about  us — it  was  a  large  and 
simple  and  almost  empty  occasion;  yet 
empty  without  embarrassment,  rather  as 
from  a  certain  high  guardedness  or  defensive- 


100          THE   MIDDLE  YEARS 

ness  of  situation,  literally  indeed  from  the 
material,  the  local  sublimity,  the  fact  of  our 
all  upliftedly  hanging  together  over  one  of 
the  grandest  sweeps  of  view  in  England.  Re 
membered  passages  again  people,  however, 
in  their  proportion,  the  excess  of  opportunity; 
each  with  that  conclusive  note  of  the  out 
right  all  unadorned.  What  could  have  par 
taken  more  of  this  quality  for  instance  than 
the  question  I  was  startled  to  hear  launched 
before  we  had  left  the  table  by  the  chance 
of  Mrs.  Greville's  having  happened  to  men 
tion  in  some  connection  one  of  her  French 
relatives,  Mademoiselle  Laure  de  Sade?  It 
had  fallen  on  my  own  ear — the  mention  at 
least  had — with  a  certain  effect  of  unconscious 
provocation;  but  this  was  as  nothing  to  its 
effect  on  the  ear  of  our  host.  "De  Sade?" 
he  at  once  exclaimed  with  interest — and  with 
the  consequence,  I  may  frankly  add,  of  my 
wondering  almost  to  ecstasy,  that  is  to  the 
ecstasy  of  curiosity,  to  what  length  he  would 
proceed.  He  proceeded  admirably — admi 
rably  for  the  triumph  of  simplification — to 
the  very  greatest  length  imaginable,  as  was 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  101 

signally  promoted  by  the  fact  that  clearly 
no  one  present,  with  a  single  exception, 
recognised  the  name  or  the  nature  of  the  scan 
dalous,  the  long  ignored,  the  at  last  all  but 
unnameable  author;  least  of  all  the  gentle 
relative  of  Mademoiselle  Laure,  who  listened 
with  the  blankest  grace  to  her  friend's 
enumeration  of  his  titles  to  infamy,  among 
which  that  of  his  most  notorious  work  was 
pronounced.  It  was  the  homeliest,  frankest, 
most  domestic  passage,  as  who  should  say, 
and  most  remarkable  for  leaving  none  of  us 
save  myself,  by  my  impression,  in  the  least 
embarrassed  or  bewildered;  largely,  I  think, 
because  of  the  failure — a  failure  the  most 
charmingly  flat — of  all  measure  on  the  part 
of  auditors  and  speaker  alike  of  what  might 
be  intended  or  understood,  of  what,  in  fine, 
the  latter  was  talking  about. 

He  struck  me  in  truth  as  neither  knowing 
nor  communicating  knowledge,  and  I  recall 
how  I  felt  this  note  in  his  own  case  to  belong 
to  that  general  intimation  with  which  the 
whole  air  was  charged  of  the  want  of  propor 
tion  between  the  great  spaces  and  reaches 


102          THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

and  echoes  commanded,  the  great  eminence 
attained,  and  the  quantity  and  variety  of 
experience  supposable.  So  to  discriminate 
was  in  a  manner  to  put  one's  hand  on  the 
key,  and  thereby  to  find  one's  self  in  presence 
of  a  rare  and  anomalous,  but  still  scarcely 
the  less  beautiful  fact.  The  assured  and 
achieved  conditions,  the  serenity,  the  security, 
the  success,  to  put  it  vulgarly,  shone  in  the 
light  of  their  easiest  law — that  by  which  they 
emerge  early  from  the  complication  of  life, 
the  great  adventure  of  sensibility,  and  find 
themselves  determined  once  for  all,  fortu 
nately  fixed,  all  consecrated  and  consecrating. 
If  I  should  speak  of  this  impression  as  that 
of  glory  without  history,  that  of  the  poetic 
character  more  worn  than  paid  for,  or  at 
least  more  saved  than  spent,  I  should  doubt 
less  much  over-emphasise;  but  such,  or 
something  like  it,  was  none  the  less  the  ex 
planation  that  met  one's  own  fond  fancy  of 
the  scene  after  one  had  cast  about  for  it. 
For  I  allow  myself  thus  to  repeat  that  I  was 
so  moved  to  cast  about,  and  perhaps  at  no 
moment  more  than  during  the  friendly 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  103 

analysis  of  the  reputation  of  M.  de  Sade. 
Was  I  not  present  at  some  undreamed-of 
demonstration  of  the  absence  of  the  remoter 
real,  the  real  other  than  immediate  and  ex 
quisite,  other  than  guaranteed  and  enclosed, 
in  landscape,  friendship,  fame,  above  all  in 
consciousness  of  awaited  and  admired  and 
self -consistent  inspiration  ? 

The  question  was  indeed  to  be  effectively 
answered  for  me,  and  everything  meanwhile 
continued  to  play  into  this  prevision — even 
to  the  pleasant  growling  note  heard  behind 
me,  as  the  Bard  followed  with  Mrs.  Greville, 
who  had  permitted  herself  apparently  some 
mild  extravagance  of  homage:  "Oh  yes, 
you  may  do  what  you  like — so  long  as  you 
don't  kiss  me  before  the  cabman!"  The 
allusion  was  explained  for  us,  if  I  remember 
— a  matter  of  some  more  or  less  recent  leave- 
taking  of  admirer  and  admired  in  London  on 
his  putting  her  down  at  her  door  after  being 
taken  to  the  play  or  wherever;  between  the 
rugged  humour  of  which  reference  and  the 
other  just  commemorated  there  wasn't  a 
pin  to  choose,  it  struck  me,  for  a  certain  old- 


104  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

time  Lincolnshire  ease  or  comfortable  stay- 
at-home  license.  But  it  was  later  on,  when, 
my  introductress  having  accompanied  us,  I 
sat  upstairs  with  him  in  his  study,  that  he 
might  read  to  us  some  poem  of  his  own  that 
we  should  venture  to  propose,  it  was  then 
that  mystifications  dropped,  that  everything 
in  the  least  dislocated  fell  into  its  place,  and 
that  image  and  picture  stamped  themselves 
strongly  and  finally,  or  to  the  point  even,  as 
I  recover  it,  of  leaving  me  almost  too  little 
to  wonder  about.  He  had  not  got  a  third 
of  the  way  through  Locksley  Hall,  which, 
my  choice  given  me,  I  had  made  bold  to 
suggest  he  should  spout — for  I  had  already 
heard  him  spout  in  Eaton  Place — before  I 
had  begun  to  wonder  that  I  didn't  wonder, 
didn't  at  least  wonder  more  consumedly; 
as  a  very  little  while  back  I  should  have  made 
sure  of  my  doing  on  any  such  prodigious  oc 
casion.  I  sat  at  one  of  the  windows  that  hung 
over  space,  noting  how  the  windy,  watery 
autumn  day,  sometimes  sheeting  it  all  with 
rain,  called  up  the  dreary,  dreary  moorland 
or  the  long  dun  wolds;  I  pinched  myself  for 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  105 

the  determination  of  my  identity  and  hung 
on  the  reader's  deep-voiced  chant  for  the 
credibility  of  his:  I  asked  myself  in  fine 
why,  in  complete  deviation  from  everything 
that  would  have  seemed  from  far  back  cer 
tain  for  the  case,  I  failed  to  swoon  away 
under  the  heaviest  pressure  I  had  doubtless 
ever  known  the  romantic  situation  bring  to 
bear.  So  lucidly  all  the  while  I  considered, 
so  detachedly  I  judged,  so  dissentingly,  to 
tell  the  whole  truth,  I  listened;  pinching  my 
self,  as  I  say,  not  at  all  to  keep  from  swoon 
ing,  but  much  rather  to  set  up  some  rush  of 
sensibility.  It  was  all  interesting,  it  was  at 
least  all  odd;  but  why  in  the  name  of  poetic 
justice  had  one  anciently  heaved  and  flushed 
with  one's  own  recital  of  the  splendid  stuff 
if  one  was  now  only  to  sigh  in  secret  "Oh 
dear,  oh  dear"?  The  author  lowered  the 
whole  pitch,  that  of  expression,  that  of  inter 
pretation  above  all;  I  heard  him,  in  cool 
surprise,  take  even  more  out  of  his  verse  than 
he  had  put  in,  and  so  bring  me  back  to  the 
point  I  had  immediately  and  privately  made, 
the  point  that  he  wasn't  Tennysonian.  I 


106  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

felt  him  as  he  went  on  and  on  lose  that  char 
acter  beyond  repair,  and  no  effect  of  the 
organ-roll,  of  monotonous  majesty,  no  sug 
gestion  of  the  long  echo,  availed  at  all  to  save 
it.  What  the  case  came  to  for  me,  I  take  it 
—and  by  the  case  I  mean  the  intellectual, 
the  artistic — was  that  it  lacked  the  intelli 
gence,  the  play  of  discrimination,  I  should 
have  taken  for  granted  in  it,  and  thereby, 
brooding  monster  that  I  was,  born  to  dis 
criminate  a  tout  propos,  lacked  the  interest. 
Detached  I  have  mentioned  that  I  had 
become,  and  it  was  doubtless  at  such  a  rate 
high  time  for  that;  though  I  hasten  to  re 
peat  that  with  the  close  of  the  incident  I 
was  happily  able  to  feel  a  new  sense  in  the 
whole  connection  established.  My  critical 
reaction  hadn't  in  the  least  invalidated  our 
great  man's  being  a  Bard — it  had  in  fact 
made  him  and  left  him  more  a  Bard  than 
ever:  it  had  only  settled  to  my  perception 
as  not  before  what  a  Bard  might  and  mightn't 
be.  The  character  was  just  a  rigid  idiosyn 
crasy,  to  which  everything  in  the  man  con 
formed,  but  which  supplied  nothing  outside 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  107 

of  itself,  and  which  above  all  was  not  intel 
lectually  wasteful  or  heterogeneous,  conscious 
as  it  could  only  be  of  its  intrinsic  breadth 
and  weight.  On  two  or  three  occasions  of 
the  aftertime  I  was  to  hear  Browning  read 
out  certain  of  his  finest  pages,  and  this  ex 
actly  with  all  the  exhibition  of  point  and  au 
thority,  the  expressive  particularisation,  so  to 
speak,  that  I  had  missed  on  the  part  of  the 
Laureate;  an  observation  through  which 
the  author  of  Men  and  Women  appeared,  in 
spite  of  the  beauty  and  force  of  his  demon 
stration,  as  little  as  possible  a  Bard.  He 
particularised  if  ever  a  man  did,  was  hetero 
geneous  and  profane,  composed  of  pieces 
and  patches  that  betrayed  some  creak  of 
joints,  and  addicted  to  the  excursions  from 
which  these  were  brought  home;  so  that  he 
had  to  prove  himself  a  poet,  almost  against 
all  presumptions,  and  with  all  the  assurance 
and  all  the  character  he  could  use.  Was  not 
this  last  in  especial,  the  character,  so  close 
to  the  surface,  with  which  Browning  fairly 
bristled,  what  was  most  to  come  out  in  his 
personal  delivery  of  the  fruit  of  his  genius? 


108          THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

It  came  out  almost  to  harshness;  but  the 
result  was  that  what  he  read  showed  extraor 
dinary  life.  During  that  audition  at  Aid- 
worth  the  question  seemed  on  the  contrary 
not  of  life  at  all — save,  that  is,  of  one's  own; 
which  was  exactly  not  the  question.  With 
all  the  resonance  of  the  chant,  the  whole 
thing  was  yet  still,  with  all  the  long  swing 
of  its  motion  it  yet  remained  where  it  was — 
heaving  doubtless  grandly  enough  up  and 
down  and  beautiful  to  watch  as  through  the 
superposed  veils  of  its  long  self-conscious 
ness.  By  all  of  which  I  don't  mean  to  say 
that  I  was  not,  on  the  day  at  Aldworth, 
thoroughly  reconciled  to  learning  what  a 
Bard  consisted  of;  for  that  came  as  soon 
as  I  had  swallowed  my  own  mistake — the 
mistake  of  having  supposed  Tennyson  some 
thing  subtly  other  than  one.  I  had  supposed, 
probably,  such  an  impossibility,  had,  to  re 
peat  my  term,  so  absurdly  fantasticated, 
that  the  long  journey  round  and  about  the 
truth  no  more  than  served  me  right;  just 
as  after  all  it  at  last  left  me  quite  content. 


VII 

FT  left  me  moreover,  I  become  aware — or 
•*•  at  least  it  now  leaves  me — fingering  the 
loose  ends  of  this  particular  free  stretch  of 
my  tapestry;  so  that,  with  my  perhaps  even 
extravagant  aversion  to  loose  ends,  I  can 
but  try  for  a  moment  to  interweave  them. 
There  dangles  again  for  me  least  confusedly, 
I  think,  the  vision  of  a  dinner  at  Mrs. 
Greville's — and  I  like  even  to  remember  that 
Cadogan  Place,  where  memories  hang  thick 
for  me,  was  the  scene  of  it — which  took  its 
light  from  the  presence  of  Louisa  Lady  Water- 
ford,  who  took  hers  in  turn  from  that  com 
bination  of  rare  beauty  with  rare  talent  which 
the  previous  Victorian  age  had  for  many 
years  not  ceased  to  acclaim.  It  insists  on 
coming  back  to  me  with  the  utmost  vivid 
ness  that  Lady  Waterford  was  illustrational, 
historically,  preciously  so,  meeting  one's 
largest  demand  for  the  blest  recovery,  when 
possible,  of  some  glimmer  of  the  sense  of 

109 


110  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

personal  beauty,  to  say  nothing  of  personal 
"accomplishment,"  as  our  fathers  were  ap 
pointed  to  enjoy  it.  Scarce  to  be  sated 
that  form  of  wonder,  to  my  own  imagination, 
I  confess — so  that  I  fairly  believe  there  was 
no  moment  at  which  I  wouldn't  have  been 
ready  to  turn  my  back  for  the  time  even  on 
the  most  triumphant  actuality  of  form  and 
feature  if  a  chance  apprehension  of  a  like 
force  as  it  played  on  the  sensibility  of  the 
past  had  competed.  And  this  for  a  reason 
I  fear  I  can  scarce  explain — unless,  when  I 
come  to  consider  it,  by  the  perversity  of  a 
conviction  that  the  conditions  of  beauty  have 
improved,  though  those  of  character,  in  the 
fine  old  sense,  may  not,  and  that  with  these 
the  measure  of  it  is  more  just,  the  apprecia 
tion,  as  who  should  say,  more  competent 
and  the  effect  more  completely  attained. 

What  the  question  seems  thus  to  come  to 
would  be  a  consuming  curiosity  as  to  any 
cited  old  case  of  the  spell  in  the  very  interest 
of  one's  catching  it  comparatively  "out"; 
in  the  interest  positively  of  the  likelihood  of 
one's  doing  so,  and  this  in  the  face  of  so  many 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  111 

great  testifying  portraits.  My  private  per 
versity,  as  I  here  glance  at  it,  has  had  its 
difficulties — most  of  all  possibly  that  of  one's 
addiction,  in  growing  older,  to  allowing  a 
supreme  force  to  one's  earlier,  even  one's 
earliest,  estimates  of  physical  felicity;  or 
in  other  words  that  of  the  felt  impulse  to 
leave  the  palm  for  good  looks  to  those  who 
have  reached  out  to  it  through  the  medium  of 
our  own  history.  If  the  conditions  grow  bet 
ter  for  them  why  then  should  we  have  almost 
the  habit  of  thinking  better  of  our  handsome 
folk  dead  than  of  our  living? — and  even  to 
the  very  point  of  not  resenting  on  the  part 
of  others  similarly  affected  the  wail  of  wonder 
as  to  what  has  strangely  "become"  of  the 
happy  types  d'antan.  I  dodge  that  inquiry 
just  now — we  may  meet  it  again;  noting 
simply  the  fact  that  "old"  pretenders  to 
the  particular  crown  I  speak  of — and  in  the 
sense  especially  of  the  pretension  made  rather 
for  than  by  them — offered  to  my  eyes  a  greater 
interest  than  the  new,  whom  I  was  ready 
enough  to  take  for  granted,  as  one  for  the 
most  part  easily  could;  belonging  as  it  ex- 


112          THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

actly  did  on  the  other  hand  to  the  interest 
of  their  elders  that  this  couldn't  be  so  taken. 
That  was  just  the  attraction  of  the  latter 
claim — that  the  grounds  of  it  had  to  be  made 
out,  puzzled  out  verily  on  occasion,  but  that 
when  they  were  recognised  they  had  a  force 
all  their  own.  One  would  have  liked  to  be 
able  to  clear  the  distinction  between  the  new 
and  the  old  of  all  ambiguity — explain,  that 
is,  how  little  the  superficially  invidious  term 
was  sometimes  noted  as  having  in  common 
with  the  elderly:  so  much  was  it  a  clear  light 
held  up  to  the  question  that  truly  beautiful 
persons  might  be  old  without  being  elderly. 
Their  juniors  couldn't  be  new,  unfortunately, 
without  being  youthful — unfortunately  be 
cause  the  fact  of  youth,  so  far  from  dispelling 
ambiguity,  positively  introduced  it.  One 
made  up  one's  mind  thus  that  the  only  sure 
specimens  were,  and  had  to  be,  those  ac 
quainted  with  time,  and  with  whom  time, 
on  its  side,  was  acquainted;  those  in  fine 
who  had  borne  the  test  and  still  looked  at 
it  face  to  face.  These  were  of  one's  own 
period  of  course — one  looked  at  them  face  to 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  113 

face;  one  blessedly  hadn't  to  consider  them 
by  hearsay  or  to  refer  to  any  portrait  of  them 
for  proof:  indeed  in  presence  of  the  resist 
ing,  the  gained,  cases  one  found  one's  self 
practically  averse  to  old  facts  or  old  tradi 
tions  of  portraiture,  accompanied  by  no 
matter  what  names. 

All  of  which  leads  by  an  avenue  I  trust 
not  unduly  majestic  up  to  that  hour  of  con 
templation  during  which  I  could  see  quite 
enough  for  the  major  interest  what  was 
meant  by  Lady  Waterford's  great  reputa 
tion.  Nothing  could  in  fact  have  been  more 
informing  than  so  to  see  what  was  meant, 
than  so  copiously  to  share  with  admirers 
who  had  had  their  vision  and  passed  on;  for 
if  I  spoke  above  of  her  image  as  illustrational 
this  is  because  it  affected  me  on  the  spot  as 
so  diffusing  information.  My  impression 
was  of  course  but  the  old  story — to  which 
my  reader  will  feel  himself  treated,  I  fear, 
to  satiety:  when  once  I  had  drawn  the  cur 
tain  for  the  light  shed  by  this  or  that  or  the 
other  personal  presence  upon  the  society 
more  or  less  intimately  concerned  in  produc- 


114  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

ing  it  the  last  thing  I  could  think  of  was  to 
darken  the  scene  again.  For  this  right  or 
this  wrong  reason  then  Mrs.  Greville's  ad 
mirable  guest  struck  me  as  flooding  it;  in 
debted  in  the  highest  degree  to  every  art 
by  which  a  commended  appearance  may 
have  formed  the  habit  of  still  suggesting 
commendation,  she  certainly — to  my  imagina 
tion  at  least — triumphed  over  time  in  the 
sense  that  if  the  years,  in  their  generosity, 
went  on  helping  her  to  live,  her  grace  returned 
the  favour  by  paying  life  back  to  them.  I 
mean  that  she  reanimated  for  the  fond  analyst 
the  age  in  which  persons  of  her  type  could 
so  greatly  flourish — it  being  ever  so  perti 
nently  of  her  type,  or  at  least  of  that  of  the 
age,  that  she  was  regarded  as  having  cast 
the  spell  of  genius  as  well  as  of  beauty.  She 
painted,  and  on  the  largest  scale,  with  all 
confidence  and  facility,  and  nothing  could 
have  contributed  more,  by  my  sense,  to 
what  I  glance  at  again  as  her  illustrational 
value  than  the  apparently  widespread  ap 
preciation  of  this  fact — taken  together,  that 
is,  with  one's  own  impression  of  the  work 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  115 

of  her  hand.  There  it  was  that,  like  Mrs. 
Greville  herself,  yet  in  a  still  higher  degree, 
she  bore  witness  to  the  fine  old  felicity  of 
the  fortunate  and  the  "great"  under  the 
"old"  order  which  would  have  made  it  so 
good  then  to  live  could  one  but  have  been 
in  their  shoes.  She  determined  in  me,  I  re 
member,  a  renewed  perception  of  the  old 
order,  a  renewed  insistence  on  one's  having 
come  just  in  time  to  see  it  begin  to  stretch 
back:  a  little  earlier  one  wouldn't  have  had 
the  light  for  this  perhaps,  and  a  little  later 
it  would  have  receded  too  much. 

The  precious  persons,  the  surviving  figures, 
who  held  up,  as  I  may  call  it,  the  light  were 
still  here  and  there  to  be  met;  my  sense 
being  that  the  last  of  them,  at  least  for  any 
vision  of  mine,  has  now  quite  gone  and  that 
illustration — not  to  let  that  term  slip — ac 
cordingly  fails.  We  all  now  illustrate  to 
gether,  in  higgledy-piggledy  fashion,  or  as  a 
vast  monotonous  mob,  our  own  wonderful 
period  and  order,  and  nothing  else;  whereby 
the  historic  imagination,  under  its  acuter 
need  of  facing  backward,  gropes  before  it 


116          THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

with  a  vain  gesture,  missing,  or  all  but  missing, 
the  concrete  other,  always  other,  specimen 
which  has  volumes  to  give  where  hearsay 
has  only  snippets.  The  old,  as  we  call  it, 
I  recognise,  doesn't  disappear  all  at  once; 
the  ancien  regime  of  our  commonest  reference 
survived  the  Revolution  of  our  most  horrific 
in  patches  and  scraps,  and  I  bring  myself 
to  say  that  even  at  my  present  writing  I  am 
aware  of  more  than  one  individual  on  the 
scene  about  me  touched  comparatively  with 
the  elder  grace.  (I  think  of  the  difference 
between  these  persons  and  so  nearly  all  other 
persons  as  a  grace  for  reasons  that  become 
perfectly  clear  in  the  immediate  presence 
of  the  former,  but  of  which  a  generalising 
account  is  difficult.)  None  the  less  it  used 
to  be  one  of  the  finest  of  pleasures  to  acclaim 
and  cherish,  in  case  of  meeting  them,  one 
and  another  of  the  complete  examples  of  the 
conditions  irrecoverable,  even  if,  as  I  have 
already  noted,  they  were  themselves  least 
intelligently  conscious  of  these;  and  for  the 
enjoyment  of  that  critical  emotion  to  draw 
one's  own  wanton  line  between  the  past 
and  the  present.  The  happy  effect  of  such 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS          117 

apparitions  as  Lady  Waterford,  to  whom  I 
thus  undisseverably  cling,  though  I  might 
give  her  after  all  much  like  company,  was 
that  they  made  one  draw  it  just  where  they 
might  most  profit  from  it.  They  profited 
in  that  they  recruited  my  group  of  the  fat 
uously  fortunate,  the  class,  as  I  seemed  to 
see  it,  that  had  had  the  longest  and  happiest 
innings  in  history — happier  and  longer,  on 
the  whole,  even  than  their  congeners  of  the 
old  French  time — and  for  whom  the  future 
wasn't  going  to  be,  by  most  signs,  anything 
like  as  bland  and  benedictory  as  the  past. 
They  placed  themselves  in  the  right  perspec 
tive  for  appreciation,  and  did  it  quite  without 
knowing,  which  was  half  the  interest;  did 
it  simply  by  showing  themselves  with  all 
the  right  grace  and  the  right  assurance.  It 
was  as  if  they  had  come  up  to  the  very  edge 
of  the  ground  that  was  going  to  begin  to 
fail  them;  yet  looking  over  it,  looking  on 
and  on  always,  with  a  confidence  still  un- 
alarmed.  One  would  have  turned  away  cer 
tainly  from  the  sight  of  any  actual  catas 
trophe,  wouldn't  have  watched  the  ground 
nearly  fail,  in  a  particular  case,  without  a 


118  THE  MIDDLE  YEARS 

sense  of  gross  indelicacy.  I  can  scarcely 
say  how  vivid  I  felt  the  drama  so  preparing 
might  become — that  of  the  lapse  of  imme 
morial  protection,  that  of  the  finally  com 
plete  exposure  of  the  immemorially  protected. 
It  might  take  place  rather  more  intensely 
before  the  footlights  of  one's  inner  vision 
than  on  the  trodden  stage  of  Cadogan  Place 
or  wherever,  but  it  corresponded  none  the 
less  to  realities  all  the  while  in  course  of  en 
actment  and  which  only  wanted  the  attentive 
enough  spectator.  Nothing  should  I  ever 
more  see  comparable  to  the  large  fond  con 
sensus  of  admiration  enjoyed  by  my  beatific 
fellow-guest's  imputed  command  of  the  very 
palette  of  the  Venetian  and  other  masters — 
Titian's,  Bonifazio's,  Rubens's,  where  did 
the  delightful  agreement  on  the  subject  stop  ? 
and  never  again  should  a  noble  lady  be  lifted 
so  still  further  aloft  on  the  ecstatic  breath 
of  connoisseurship. 

This  last  consciousness,  confirming  my  im 
pression  of  a  climax  that  could  only  decline, 
didn't  break  upon  me  all  at  once  but  spread 
itself  through  a  couple  of  subsequent  oc- 


THE  MIDDLE  YEARS  119 

casions  into  which  my  remembrance  of  the 
dinner  at  Mrs.  Greville's  was  richly  to  play* 
The  first  of  these  was  a  visit  to  an  exhibi 
tion  of  Lady  Waterford's  paintings  held, 
in  Carlton  House  Terrace,  under  the  roof 
of  a  friend  of  the  artist,  and,  as  it  enriched 
the  hour  also  to  be  able  to  feel,  a  friend,  one 
of  the  most  generously  gracious,  of  my  own; 
during  which  the  reflection  that  "they"  had 
indeed  had  their  innings,  and  were  still  splen 
didly  using  for  the  purpose  the  very  fag-end 
of  the  waning  time,  mixed  itself  for  me  with 
all  the  "wonderful  colour"  framed  and  ar 
rayed,  that  blazed  from  the  walls  of  the 
kindly  great  room,  lent  for  the  advantage 
of  a  charity,  and  lost  itself  in  the  general 
chorus  of  immense  comparison  and  tender 
consecration.  Later  on  a  few  days  spent  at 
a  house  of  the  greatest  beauty  and  interest 
in  Northumberland  did  wonders  to  round 
off  my  view;  the  place,  occupied  for  the 
time  by  genial  tenants,  belonged  to  the 
family  of  Lady  Waterford's  husband  and 
fairly  bristled,  it  might  be  said,  with  coloured 
designs  from  her  brush.  .  . 


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